327 Quotes by Colum McCann

That’s what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.

Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrapy your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

How very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along – trying to wound his faith in order to test it – and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

There are those of us who haven’t yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock – perhaps I must tell it before it is forgotten or becomes like everything else, something else.

You can count the dead, but you can’t count the cost. We’ve got no math for Heaven...

But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely.

You have to look on the world with a shine like no one else has.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky – pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.