Quote

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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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Memory
Clean
Understood
Needed
Memories
Look
Obliteration
Looks
Slate
Immediately

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There is always room for at least two truths.
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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.
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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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About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.
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I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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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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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.
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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.
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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
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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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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
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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.
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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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