Colum McCann Quotes

It is impossible, after a certain point, to go back to a previous way of life, a previous way of thinking.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.

I love to watch times change!

It doesn't get better, it doesn't get worse, but it sure gets different!

Nothing changes like changes, because nothing changes but the changes.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

Change always takes time.

Change won't happen overnight.

Change is the very fabric of our time.

We cannot go backward,' Marco says. 'A great deal is not how it used to be.

Tis but a short journey across the isthmus of Now.

What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.

All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.

The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The new order is Rapidly fadin'. And the first one now Will later be last For the times they are a-changin'.

Change is possible.' 'Change is inevitable.

The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.

Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin?

There is the sudden. There is the eventual. And in between, there is the living.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension.

The feeling that you get.... when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were.

It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.