Colum McCann Quotes

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

I don't know what 'home' or 'abroad' is any more.

I don't recognize my former self. Like I'm on the outside looking in at my life. Who is that guy?

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad. You exist in a bubble. There comes a point where you suddenly feel not really a part of the world, you're just passing through.

Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day.

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

My face is muffled in my mother's clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

Did you ever look in the mirror And see a stranger standing there? Did you ever drive for miles and miles And wonder how on earth you got yourself there?

For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

Pero yo ya no soy yo Ni mi casa es ya mi casa. But now I am no longer I, nor is my house any longer my house.

It's an abnormal world I live in. I don't belong anywhere. It's like I'm floating down the middle. I'm never quite sure where I am.

Where are you now?’ Where was I now? Gripping the receiver, I raised my hand and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.

It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real.

I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.

I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.

Wrap parties can be really sad, actually, disorienting.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

We live in a strange bubble.