327 Quotes by Colum McCann

They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn’t count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn’t figure out how many crosses to go into the ground.

There are no days more full than those we go back to.