327 Quotes by Colum McCann

It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

There is always room for at least two truths.

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.

As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.