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
men looks want
He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.
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.
war hate simple
The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.
lying
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
There are no days more full than those we go back to.
body fiction alive
Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
literature stories life-is
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
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.
tired grieving heaven
She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.
thinking self people
People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
giving long alive
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.