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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
Words
Sometimes
Good
Things
Function
Aren
Saying

More quotes by 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
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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
Colum McCann
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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
Colum McCann
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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.
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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She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs-- she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.
Colum McCann
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If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
Colum McCann
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The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
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.
Colum McCann
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I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book
Colum McCann
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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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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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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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I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.
Colum McCann
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We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.
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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The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
Colum McCann
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He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.
Colum McCann
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There is always room for at least two truths.
Colum McCann
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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
Colum McCann