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We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Thing
Way
People
Eventually
Listen
Stories

More quotes by Colum McCann

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I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
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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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
Colum McCann
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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
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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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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We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.
Colum McCann
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I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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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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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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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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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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
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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There is always room for at least two truths.
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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...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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We have to admire the world for not ending on us.
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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Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
Colum McCann