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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
Write
Tell
Recall
Mother
Recalls
Past
Sons
Come
Mothers
Writing
Son
Realize
Realizing

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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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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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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
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There is always room for at least two truths.
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There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.
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Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.
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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
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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.
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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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He might have been naive, but he didn't care he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.
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The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.
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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.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
Colum McCann
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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
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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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Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
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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.
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I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.
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The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
Colum McCann