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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.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Past
Sons
Come
Mothers
Writing
Son
Realize
Realizing
Write
Tell
Recall
Mother
Recalls

More quotes by Colum McCann

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A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.
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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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...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
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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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I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.
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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
Colum McCann
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Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
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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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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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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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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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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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Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
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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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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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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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Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
Colum McCann
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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
Colum McCann