Top Colum McCann Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Colum McCann Biography

Colum McCann (born 28 February 1965) is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and now lives in New York. He is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht, and has visited many universities and colleges all over the world.

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Colum McCann Quotes

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

Chaos, Enough, Inspirational, Stumble, World

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

Character, Page, Participle, Rude, Sound

I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!

Alone, Book, Books, Day, Different, Years

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

Enough, Flight, Oneself, Reason

Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.

Juggling, Language, Perfection, Simply, Stories

Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.

Give, Giving, Pain, Wat

I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

Kissing, Marriage, Matter, Things, Years

He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.

Glorify, Hungry, Love, People, Use, Way

It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

Brother, Chime, Mother, Sea, Wind

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Grieving, Heaven, Life, Tired, Wanting, World

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

Breakdown, Breakdowns, Everything, Fabulous

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

Braver, Cynicism, Easy, Optimist

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

Art, Create, Desire, Joy, Recovery, Unfolds

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

Mother, Mothers, Son, Sons, Tell, Writing

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

Accumulation, Incidents, Life, Shelves

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

Order, Achieve, Difficulty, Life, Modicum

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

Darkness, Fall, Like, Sky, Stars

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

Bereavement, Children, Fascinated, Lost, Parent, Thought

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

Dark, Home, Lives, Moments, Plunge, Tunnels

I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.

Know, Knows, Things, Write, Writing

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