Quote

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

Colum McCann

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Illusion
Possibility
Happiness
Important
Always

More quotes by Colum McCann

Image
Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
Colum McCann
Image
Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don't have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.
Colum McCann
Image
A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.
Colum McCann
Image
The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
Colum McCann
Image
He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
Colum McCann
Image
There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.
Colum McCann
Image
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.
Colum McCann
Image
He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.
Colum McCann
Image
I'm of the opinion that the real is imagined and the imagined is quite real. The real is imagined, in the sense that we shape our stories, so anything that even happens on the news gets shaped in a certain way and gets a texture, and that the imagined can be real.
Colum McCann
Image
I'm only telling you on the truth, he said. If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
Colum McCann
Image
Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
Colum McCann
Image
Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
Colum McCann
Image
We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.
Colum McCann
Image
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.
Colum McCann
Image
Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCann
Image
She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.
Colum McCann
Image
About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.
Colum McCann
Image
I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
Colum McCann
Image
I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.
Colum McCann
Image
Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
Colum McCann