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
Immediately
Memory
Clean
Understood
Needed
Memories
Look
Obliteration
Looks
Slate

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Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
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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.
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We have to admire the world for not ending on us.
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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
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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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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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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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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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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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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.
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I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.
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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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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.
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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
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Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years
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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 gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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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.
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The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
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Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.
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