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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.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Life
Already
Told
Written
Literature
Stories
Stills
Still
Many
Remind

More quotes by Colum McCann

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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
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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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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
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Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
Colum McCann
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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
Colum McCann
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Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we own it, and women have really been in those quieter moments at the edge of history. But, really, they're the ones who are turning the cogs and the wheels and allowing things like the peace process to happen.
Colum McCann
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Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
Colum McCann
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Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
Colum McCann
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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
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They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.
Colum McCann
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Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
Colum McCann
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I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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There are no days more full than those we go back to.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
Colum McCann
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Whatever you say, say nothing.
Colum McCann