327 Quotes by Colum McCann

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

She lasted three months, then passed on a September day when everything seemed split open with sunlight.

Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that 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.

She was tall, exotic, so very young she seemed to flutter.

All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

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.

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.

She wanted to tell him so much, 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. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.