Colum McCann Quotes

This is a terrible confession to make, but after I left the Army I had a number of things to try. I had a great conceit to think that if all else failed I could always go to Hollywood. So when all else did fail I really went to Hollywood. And then I found out how wrong I was.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

When our daughter was born, a light went on for me - there was more to life than what I was doing. It felt like being famous for being a paint salesman. It wasn't the dream I was sold on. I'd had enough of it.

I asked certain rich men if they felt embittered. 'How could we not?' they said. So I asked them what caused this anguish. They blamed their wealth.

The American people are desperately seeking a Moses to lead them out of the wilderness, back to the land of milk and honey. They thought maybe Barack Obama was the one, and when he proved to be mortal after all, they were willing to listen to anyone new.

From my own kind I only learn How foolish comfort is

I'm as much a victim of the romantic myth of 'getting away' as anyone else. My head tells me it's myth, but I don't want to believe it is.

From minute one, I thought that after I called a game, I said 'Man, I thought I would enjoy calling a game a little more than I probably did.' I thought I would enjoy that part of it. I didn't have the fulfillment that I thought I probably would.

But then, my entire life is bullshit. The best things in it have vanished, ghosts. Ghosts I'll admit I created.

So foolish is the heart of man that he ever puts his hope in the future, learning nothing from his past errors and fancying that tomorrow must be better than today.

And what had he wanted? He'd never sat down to think about it. But mostly, he wanted yesterday to be different from today.

In the first place, you shouldn't believe in promises. The world is full of them: the promises of riches, of eternal salvation, of infinite love. Some people think they can promise anything, others accept whatever seems to guarantee better days ahead, as, I suspect is your case. Those who make promises they don't keep end up powerless and frustrated, and exactly the fate awaits those who believe promises.

I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter.

My future will not copy my fair past, I wrote that once. And, thinking at my side my ministering life-angel justified the word by his appealing look upcast to the white throne of God.

I think when you're a teenager, you always feel as if life is happening somewhere else - it certainly isn't happening to you. And then you get to the place where you think your life is supposed to be, and you look around and realize it doesn't exist.

I walked away a little disheartened, thinking, 'Oh well. I came a long way to meet the Wizard of Oz, but I guess I won't. Such is life.

Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.

While to live in the past and think of what was good and beautiful about it amounts to a sort of seasoning of the present, the perennial wait for tomorrow is bound to result in chronic discontent that poisons one's entire outlook.

I cannot think of a thing that was better in those good old days.

The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.

I should have known right then it was too good to last, God, it's such a drag when you're livin' in the past

In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality.

He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

I often used to think myself in the case of the fox-hunter, who, when he had toiled and sweated all day in the chase as if some unheard-of blessing was to crown his success, finds at last all he has got by his labor is a stinking nauseous animal. But my condition was yet worse than his; for he leaves the loathsome wretch to be torn by his hounds, whilst I was obliged to fondle mine, and meanly pretend him to be the object of my love.