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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
Still
Heavy
Memory
Exactly
Took
Memories
Land
Impossible
Stills

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I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
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I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
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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 gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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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.
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The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
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I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
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There are no days more full than those we go back to.
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I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.
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There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
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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.
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There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.
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I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.
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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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Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.
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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.
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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
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This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
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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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She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
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