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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
Told
Written
Literature
Stories
Stills
Still
Many
Remind
Life
Already

More quotes by Colum McCann

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I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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We have to admire the world for not ending on us.
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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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
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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We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.
Colum McCann
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Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years
Colum McCann
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There is always room for at least two truths.
Colum McCann
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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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The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
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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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
Colum McCann
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One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
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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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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Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
Colum McCann
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We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.
Colum McCann