Colum McCann
Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.Collection: Song
Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.Collection: Fabulous
...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.Collection: Hatred
She wanted to tell him so mach, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create.Collection: Running
Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.Collection: Summer
They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.Collection: Heart
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Order
No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.Collection: Loneliness
We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Pain
One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.Collection: Clouds
And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.Collection: Thinking
The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.Collection: Tunes
I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.Collection: Children
He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.Collection: Kind
Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.Collection: Art
...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.Collection: Silence
Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in yearsCollection: Discovery
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.Collection: Tunnels
I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open BookCollection: Book
Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.Collection: Men
That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.Collection: Mother
If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.Collection: Should
With all respects to heaven, I like it here.Collection: Heaven
Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.Collection: Sometimes
I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.Collection: Wind
How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.Collection: Ordinary
Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.Collection: Loneliness
So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.Collection: Dream
I'm of the opinion that the real is imagined and the imagined is quite real. The real is imagined, in the sense that we shape our stories, so anything that even happens on the news gets shaped in a certain way and gets a texture, and that the imagined can be real.Collection: Real
Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.Collection: Writing
There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.Collection: Character
A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.Collection: Clever
If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.Collection: Writing
If you sort of see yourself writing into a space that you don't always recognize, you sometimes learn things that you knew, but weren't entirely aware of. It's very liberating for a writer to go into a space where she or he has not gone before, because, instead of being a tourist, you're like an explorer now, and you're sort of lost in this new idea.Collection: Writing
Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.Collection: Perfection
We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.Collection: People
The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.Collection: Thinking
He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.Collection: Heart
I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.Collection: Blessed
Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.Collection: Life
Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.Collection: Past
It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.Collection: New York
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.Collection: New York
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.Collection: People
One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.Collection: Memories
I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if I can get them and grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, you can do this, and if I see that fire in their eyes, that's when I think I know a writer.Collection: Writing
Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we own it, and women have really been in those quieter moments at the edge of history. But, really, they're the ones who are turning the cogs and the wheels and allowing things like the peace process to happen.Collection: Believe