327 Quotes by Colum McCann

She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs – she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.

So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.

I don’t know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They’re the only thing we have that can trump life itself.

I have the most charmed, most – I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.

Rami, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it’s crazy.

When you come into a rich man’s house, the only place to split is in his face.

Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That’s why they became evil. That’s why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn’t matter – it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

There’s a high that you get when you’re writing code. It’s cool. It’s easy to do. You forget your mom, your dad, everything. You’ve got the whole country onboard. This is America. You hit the frontier. You can go anywhere. It’s about being connected, access, gateways, like a whispering game where if you get one thing wrong you’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning.

So many people considered Rami a traitor, a lackey, a turncoat, but in the end he didn’t care: he knew what he was doing, he knew he was getting under their skin, he was peeling it back, exposing the rawness. He was outnumbered, yes, but they would find a tipping point sometime, somewhere, along the way. It was inevitable. He had to keep telling the story. Repeating it again and again and again.