Colum McCann Quotes

To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking.

When Andy died, I just drank to dumb my mind.

When my mum first told me she got sick, I didn't cry. I probably cried over my mum's illness twice.

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.

People always say time heals. Time doesn't necessarily heal anything. It allows you to manage things. There are occasions where you feel the pain as if it just happened, but you know that it's a fleeting moment.

I think of depression as the mechanism that pushes down the pain of that loss. It tries to distance us from the loss but it lowers our whole energy level. I think that's a pervasive way we end up responding to loss or the anticipation of loss. Natural but not necessary.

I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain.

I wouldn't say that cutting was pleasurable, but there is a sense of euphoria that follows cutting yourself. The quick pinch of pain and the sight of blood snaps you back to the surface and you start to appreciate being alive.

I never thought that alcohol could ease the notion of the sadness, Now what used to be a happy home done turned into some bad sh!t

What it boils down to is that each person has his own ways of coping with trauma and grief, with the pain of life, and astrology was one of mine. Don't criticize me, I wanted to say, until you have stood in my place. This helped me. Nobody was hurt by it.

the only way to tolerate the thought of her mother sleeping with that man was to get drunk-very drunk.

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

I go to my Room and I drink and I smoke some cigarettes and I think about her. I drink and I smoke and I think about her and at a certain point blackness comes and my memory fails me.

I'm sixty-eight, I cry every chance I can.

Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and cut and drink because you need an anesthetic and it works. For awhile. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's to late because you are maintaining it now,straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop.

Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you watch a lot of Cartoon Network and drink mid-price Chardonnay at 11 in the morning.

So sadness is a place?' Giovanni asked. 'Sometimes people live there for years,'I said.

She plays music to heal herself, but nothing can heal her brokenness.

I repeat his words in my head. What's going on? What's going on? Oh, well, since you asked, I got a bunch of tapes in the mail today from a girl who killed herself. Apparently, I had something to do with it. I'm not sure what that is, so I was wondering if I could borrow your Walkman to find out. 'Not much,' I say.

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

Soothing words can become just another drug we swallow to dull our pain.

A black man, but I feel so blue. So I smoke green and purple to my dreams come true. And my eyes turn red, the sky turns grey.

I was largely drinking to forget where I was. When you’re in a place like Vietnam, you get to a point where you don’t care any more. You’re in a place that’s foreign to you, and you know for a fact that many people there hate you and will kill you if they get the chance. It really does something to your mind to know that many of the people living around you don’t like you and want you to die.

When a man's eyes are sore his friends do not let him finger them, however much he wishes to, nor do they themselves touch the inflammation: But a man sunk in grief suffers every chance comer to stir and augment his affliction like a running sore; and by reason of the fingering and consequent irritation it hardens into a serious and intractable evil.

It only hurts when I'm not laughing.