327 Quotes by Colum McCann

I don’t really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don’t know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It’s all about language, it’s all about how you apply it to the page.

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple – hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.

About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna – as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.

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.

The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie’s jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain.

Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow.

For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.

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.