327 Quotes by Colum McCann

The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.

He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried.

It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty.

Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don’t have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.

He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they’re hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.

The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don’t go.

Without you, she wrote in Hebrew, I am without any depth, I am on the surface here, waiting.

When you divide death by life you find a circle.

At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he’d been sure that one day he’d be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you’d make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own.