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The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Sense
Moments
Look
Come
Emotional
Looks
Writer
Years
Sort
Make
Moment
Jobs

More quotes by Colum McCann

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There is always room for at least two truths.
Colum McCann
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A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.
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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Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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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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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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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.
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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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
Colum McCann
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She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
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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Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.
Colum McCann
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The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
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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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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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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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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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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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