Colum McCann Time Quotations

I'd been involved in journalism for a long time - my dad's a journalist, he's written many books, and when I was twelve years old I wrote reports on local football matches for the newspapers.

I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.

I think we're moving toward moments of grace and understanding. And I think these things take time.

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.