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If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Dance
Stand
Asks
Stills
Still

More quotes by 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 world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.
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.
Colum McCann
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I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
Colum McCann
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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
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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Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
Colum McCann
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I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.
Colum McCann
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Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.
Colum McCann
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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.
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
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One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
Colum McCann
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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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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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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.
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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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
Colum McCann