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Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Good
Things
Function
Aren
Saying
Words
Sometimes

More quotes by 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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I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if I can get them and grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, you can do this, and if I see that fire in their eyes, that's when I think I know a writer.
Colum McCann
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A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.
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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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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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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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Whatever you say, say nothing.
Colum McCann
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She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.
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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.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
Colum McCann
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Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
Colum McCann
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With all respects to heaven, I like it here.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.
Colum McCann
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Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.
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.
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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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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann