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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.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Good
Towards
Notion
Tilted
Forever
Sideways
Chance
Ingenuity
Pain
Tea
Making
Cruel
Human
Cups
Humans
Inevitable

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There is always room for at least two truths.
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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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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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I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
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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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Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.
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I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
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About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.
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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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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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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.
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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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Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years
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The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
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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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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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