Fishing the Sloe-Black River Quotes

“Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.”
― Colum McCann, Fishing the Sloe-Black River

“All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.”
― Colum McCann, Fishing the Sloe-Black River

“For a moment I felt a vicious hatred for him and his quiet ways, his mundane stroll through the summer, his ordinariness, the banality of everything he had become. He should have been a hero or a seer. He should have told me some incredible story that I could carry with me forever. After all, he had been the one who had run along the beach parallel to a porpoise, who filled his pockets full of pebbles, who could lift the stray orange cat in his fingers.”
― Colum McCann, Fishing the Sloe-Black River

“My father moaned at the dinner table about the huge toll that emigration was having on his undertaking business. 'Everyone's gone somewhere else to die,' he'd say.”
― Colum McCann, Fishing the Sloe-Black River

“I have come to think of our lives as the colors of that place- hers a piece of bog cotton, mine as black as the water found when men slash too deep in the soil with a shovel.”
― Colum McCann, Fishing the Sloe-Black River