Colum McCann Quotes

Back on its golden hinges The gate of Memory swings, And my heart goes into the garden And walks with the olden things.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

The dearest days in one's life are those that seem very far and very near at once.

I was right when I said I'd never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can't ever do anything else except look back.

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast

Now I am sober and there's only the hangover and the memory of love.

Every day I'll wear your memory like a favorite shirt upon my back

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

All my life, Following Care along the dusty road, Have I looked back on loveliness and sighed.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

Music is...a form of remembering, a return to the seasons of the heart long gone.

Any place you love is the world to you”, explained the pensive Catherine Wheel, who had been attached to an old deal box in early life, and prided herself on her broken heart; “but love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once- But it is no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Memory is not what the heart desires.

So in the heart, When, fading slowly down the past, Fond memories depart, And each that leaves it seems the last; Long after all the rest are flown, Returns a solitary tone,— The after-echo of departed years,— And touches all the soul to tears.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.