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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“You know, when you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again.”

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

“He told me once that there is no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along - trying to wound his faith in order to test it - and I was just another stone in the way of his God.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.”

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

“Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“The theater began shortly after lunch. His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“He believed in walking beautifully, elegantly. It had to work as a kind of faith that he would get to the other side. He had fallen once while training - once exactly, so he felt it couldn't happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary anyway. In any work of beauty there had to be one small thread left hanging.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

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“At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Those Who Saw Him Hushed

Colum McCann photo

“Sometimes we walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They're not Magdalenes. You're just a bum among them. You're looking for the poor man within? Why don't you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?”

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

“He wondered if that was what the moment of death was about, the noise of the world and then ease away from it.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

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“The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Those Who Saw Him Hushed

Colum McCann photo

“A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student — thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.”

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

“You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time.
But there it was again, the girl's spreading bloodstain.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.”

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

“I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

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

Colum McCann photo

“Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world's oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: Miró, Miró, on the Wall