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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Impossible
Stills
Still
Heavy
Memory
Exactly
Took
Memories
Land

More quotes by Colum McCann

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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
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I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.
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Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
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It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.
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Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
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Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years
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There are no days more full than those we go back to.
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Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.
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...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
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I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.
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One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
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People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
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I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
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I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book
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I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if I can get them and grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, you can do this, and if I see that fire in their eyes, that's when I think I know a writer.
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I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.
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