Colum McCann
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Children
Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.Collection: Pain
I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.Collection: Said
She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.Collection: Pain
I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!Collection: Book
There is always room for at least two truths.Collection: Two
I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.Collection: Honesty
He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.Collection: Memories
He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.Collection: Lasts
Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.Collection: Pain
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.Collection: Important
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.Collection: Real
We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it 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 really was, what it meant.Collection: Memories
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.Collection: Memories
We shape ourselves by our imaginative reach.Collection: Shapes
I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.Collection: Writing
I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.Collection: Beautiful
What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.Collection: Incidents
Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.Collection: Fiction
The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.Collection: Being Ignored
I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.Collection: Class
I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.Collection: Jobs
Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.Collection: Sometimes
The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Stories
I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.Collection: Kissing
She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.Collection: New York
The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Men
You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11.Collection: Thinking
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday... He consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.Collection: Real
Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.Collection: Mistake
Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.Collection: Fiction
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.Collection: Tired
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.Collection: Lying
Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.Collection: Fighting
It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.Collection: Mother
People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.Collection: People
A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.Collection: Book
I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.Collection: Fiction
You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven.Collection: Math
Whatever you say, say nothing.Collection: Whatever You Say
I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Dark