Colum McCann Quotes

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

God and death kind of resemble each other, because the only time a lot of people will try and talk to God is when someone's died.

I am left alone in the wide world. My own dear family I have buried: one in Rangoon, and two in Amherst. What remains for me but to hold myself in readiness to follow the dear departed to that blessed world, 'Where my best friends, my kindred dwell, where God, my Saviour, reigns.'

I'm more of a realist when it comes to life, and I'd much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

They which have no hope of a life to come, may extend their griefs for the loss of this, and equal the days of their mourning with the years of the life of man.

Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.

I think everyone, especially after the passing of a loved one, starts to hope that maybe there will be something better on the other side.

George Harrison's passing was really sad, but it does make the afterlife seem much more attractive.

Each departed friend is a magnet that attracts us to the next world.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another.

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

Death is too much to ask of the living.

They sent forth men to battle, But no such men return; And home, to claim their welcome, Come ashes in an urn

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

Death is an awful thing. I don't believe in it myself.

My wife is already in Heaven.

Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.

For a person who is dying only eternity counts.

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.

I'm aware that people I have loved and have died and are in the spirit world looking after me.

They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.