Quote

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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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Almost
Others
Littles
Stumble
Find
Ongoing
Little
Noise
Enough
Thinks
Thinking
Silence
Bring

More quotes by Colum McCann

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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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Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
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I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
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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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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.
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I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
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There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.
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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.
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I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.
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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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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'm only telling you on the truth, he said. If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
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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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
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.
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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
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The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
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.
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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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Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
Colum McCann