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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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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Best
Never
Dreamed
Allowed
Democracy
Stories
Become

More quotes by Colum McCann

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I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.
Colum McCann
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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
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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The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
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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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.
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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I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
Colum McCann
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I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.
Colum McCann
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There is always room for at least two truths.
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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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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With all respects to heaven, I like it here.
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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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.
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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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCann
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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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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.
Colum McCann
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
Colum McCann