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Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Pain
Give
Giving

More quotes by 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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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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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
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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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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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.
Colum McCann
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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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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
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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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
Colum McCann
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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.
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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The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
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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If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
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