Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCannis an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and now lives in New York. He is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht, and has visited many universities and colleges all over the world...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth28 February 1965
CountryIreland
tunes
The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
whatever-you-say
Whatever you say, say nothing.
sometimes sometimes-in-life happens
Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.
steps ordinary moments
How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.
pain forever tea
She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
life people wish
Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
dark shining lessons
Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.
order trying stones
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.
children growing-up thinking
That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.
people use way
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.
cities everyday littles
The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.
thinking rocks earth
There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.
light cities tunnels
He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.
fabulous breakdown
Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.