Quote

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

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Made
Didn
Coming
Tunnels
Like
Ends
Cities
Rubbish
Light
Wasn
Rush
Firsts
Growing
Entering
Matter
Came
Findings
First
Half
Finding
Sometimes
Fact
Surprise
Tunnel
Much
Facts
City
Tolerable

More quotes by Colum McCann

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The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
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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.
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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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I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
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I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
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Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.
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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.
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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
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I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
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Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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I'm only telling you on the truth, he said. If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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Whatever you say, say nothing.
Colum McCann
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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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Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.
Colum McCann
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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
Colum McCann