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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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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Writing
Philosophically
Logically
Ultimately
Impossible
Write
Ever

More quotes by 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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...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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There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
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
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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.
Colum McCann
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The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
Colum McCann
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She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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There are no days more full than those we go back to.
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 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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Whatever you say, say nothing.
Colum McCann
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Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
Colum McCann
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A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.
Colum McCann
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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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Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we own it, and women have really been in those quieter moments at the edge of history. But, really, they're the ones who are turning the cogs and the wheels and allowing things like the peace process to happen.
Colum McCann
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I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.
Colum McCann