Colum McCann > Quotes

“Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Good days, they come around the oddest corners.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.

There is, I think, a fear of love.

There is a fear of love.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“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, Let the Great World Spin

“People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He
went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He
took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“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, Let the Great World Spin

“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, Let the Great World Spin

“Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“Nobody falls halfway”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“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, Let the Great World Spin

“...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find
in the grime of the everyday...he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“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. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“There are no days more full than those we go back to.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“She wanted to tell him so mach, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. ”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“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.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“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.

He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“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

“Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin