Quotes from book
Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann

Let the Great World Spin is a novel by Colum McCann set mainly in New York City in the United States. The book won the 2009 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, one of the most lucrative literary prizes in the world. Its title comes from the poem "Locksley Hall" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

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“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann photo

“People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann photo

“I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann photo

“She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann photo

“And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann photo

“Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann photo

“The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: A Fear of Love

Colum McCann photo

“People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time - but even on the best day nobody's perfect.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book Three: All Hail and Hallelujah

Colum McCann photo

“Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann photo

“He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann photo

“The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book Three: Centavos

Colum McCann photo

“There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here

Colum McCann photo

“Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. even of people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, he said, it had to be fought for.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: A Fear of Love

Colum McCann photo

“He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NE YORK FUCKIN' CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book Three: Part of the Parts

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“If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here

Colum McCann photo

“Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: A Fear of Love

Colum McCann photo

“New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddamn about what it left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book Three: Part of the Parts

Colum McCann photo

“Everything had purpose, signal, meaning.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Let the Great World Spin Forever Down

Colum McCann photo

“It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness of the throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing. This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), The Ringing Grooves of Change