327 Quotes by Colum McCann

It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.

It’s the sort of hum that makes you feel that you’re the actual ground lying under the sky, a blue hum that’s all above and around you, but if you think about it too hard it will get too loud or big, and make you feel no more than just a speck.

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.

Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.

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.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth – the filth, the war, the poverty – was that life could be capable of small beauties.

And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us?

I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love.