Colum McCann > Colum's Quotes

“It struck me then that it wasn’t just one reporter who had been beheaded. The knife had been unsheathed to threaten all journalists everywhere.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“Is an aid worker any less American, less essential, than a desk sergeant? Is an ambulance driver any less important than a Marine? And what happens when an American citizen goes in search of truth for the greater good? Is that not as patriotic as the actions of a soldier in a firefight?”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“Listening is the quiet soul of storytelling”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“The truth is kaleidoscopic, it has many mirrors, and it can be viewed from a variety of angles.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“Scientists say that the world is held together with atoms, and of course, it is. But it is also held together with stories.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“He didn’t just want to be at the edge, he wanted to become the edge.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“She is an American mother. It is not a story that often gets told. Hers is a small sky though it contains so much rain. The story sometimes forgets her. She is often invisible. She dissolves at the edge of someone else’s words. But she has decided, quite against the grain, that the world is available to her too.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“Even the worst of humans demand a portion of love.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“He was the sort of person who, if he had a mirror, he wouldn’t stare into it, but break it in two in order to hold the pieces up against one another and create an infinity.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“Why in the world would an ambulance be there except to tend to a house full of broken hearts?”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“When he got home, he said: "The first thing you lose in war is the truth.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“Turning your back will not change the direction of the knife.”
― Colum McCann, American Mother

“Everything gets fixed and we all stay broken.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“The depths hum with just about everything imaginable. Moving at an unimaginable speed. In a reinforced tube no bigger than a garden hose. You are here one moment. And then, in a nanosecond, you are somewhere else.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“We are all shards in the smash up.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“The past is retrievable, yes, but it most certainly cannot be changed.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“I had begun to think that there might be something monumental here. A vague element of the mythical. The velocity of who we are. Every scrap of existence colliding inside the tubes: the weak force, the strong force, the theory of everything. And, of course, every inanity was whirling inside there too. All of it tumbling in unison along the sea floor.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“The backspin of memory lands us in the strangest of places.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“The disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“If the ocean was a bank, they’d have saved it a long time ago.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Not a single atom in our bodies today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replaced many times over. We flake away and become new. Whatever we are now, we are not the stuff from which we were originally made. All the people we once were. All the people we had once hoped to be.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“I have learned how easy it is to condescend when you don’t participate.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the sea floor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Who can say where anything truly begins? The cloud, the raindrop, the original speck of dust around which water collects? We can only ever locate the middle when we get to the end. And then, at the absolute end, what’s the point in finding the middle, or even the beginning?”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Just because the truth is ignored doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Nothing, not even words, can stop the flow of time.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Who knows what it was that the cable was carrying at the time, all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations, the theories, the chess games, the sea charts, the histories, the contracts, the divorce papers, the computer hacks, the wild lies, the voices, the terror, the nonsense, the known, the unknown, the promises, the porn, the alphabet of flesh, the sing-song of skin, the million wisps of disinformation, the flotsam of our longings, the jetsam of our truths, all of it, all, suspended in a series of wet tubes at the bottom of the ocean floor.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“So much of who we are is who we cannot be. We flatter ourselves when we think we can become something entirely new.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“I suppose we go out to sea because we want, eventually, to come home. I know this now, but it was new to me then. The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.”
― Colum McCann, Twist