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Let the Great World Spin
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Let the Great World Spin (2009) (edit title/settings)

by Colum McCann (Author) (edit contributors)

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In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets... read more

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  • “He went where he was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed...He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.”
    Ciaran (Corrigan's brother)
  • “...in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the bait of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all all the evidence. (p.20)”
    Ciaran (Corrigan's brother)
  • “...he was seldom known for his beliefs--instead, people looked at him with a fondness for another era, when time seemed slower, less complicated. Even the worst of what men did to one another didn't dampen Corrigan's beliefs. He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he'd rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic. (p. 21)”
    Ciaran (Corrigan's brother)
  • “Let it be. Silly song. really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.”
    Claire Soderberg
  • “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 if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter--it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”
    Lara
  • “All I was doing was holding my hand up against guilt. Avoiding the failure, the drugs, the recklessness. I felt so foolish and inadequate. It was as if I had burned the whole house down and was searching through the rubble for bits of how it used to be, but found only the match that had sparked it at all.”
    Lara
  • “There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.”
    Lara
  • “Listening to these people is like listening to trees--sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age. (p. 337)”
    Jaslyn
  • “The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough. (p. 349)”
    Jaslyn
  • “Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know its just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes its never even there in the first place.”
    Gloria
  • “It was as if she could travel through the electricity to see him. She could look at any electronic thing--television, radio, Solomon's shaver--and could find herself there, journeying along the raw voltage. Most of all it was the fridge. She would wake in the middle of the night and wander through the apartment into the kitchen and lean against the freezer. She would open the door then and blast herself with cool. What she liked about it was that the light wouldn't come on. She could go from warm to cold in an instant and she could remain in the darkness and not wake Solomon. No sound, just a soft plop of the rubber-edged opening, and then a rush of cold over her body, and she could gaze past the wires, the cathodes, the transistors, the hand-set switches, through the ether, and she could see him, all of a sudden she was in the very same room, right beside him, she could reach out and lay her hand on his forearm, console him, where he sat...working.”
    Claire
  • “Little else to distract attention from the evening, just a clock, in a time not too distant from the present time, yet a time not too distant from the past, the unaccountable unfolding of consequence into tomorrow's time, the simple things, the grain of bedwood alive in light, the slight argument of dark still left in the old woman's hair, the ray of moisture on the plastic lifebag, the curl of the braided flower petal, the chipped edge of a photo frame, the rim of a mug, the mark of a stray tea line along its edge, a crossword puzzle still unfinished, the yellow of a pencil dangling over the edge of the table, one end sharpened, the eraser in midair. Fragments of a human order.”
  • “It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.”
  • “It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.”
  • “Photographs keep the dead alive, the girl had said. Not true. So much more than photographs. So much more.”
  • “Pain is nothing. Pain is what you give, not what you get.”
    John Corrigan
  • “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 supposed, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.”
    Ciaran
  • “Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.”
    Gloria (pg 304)
  • “There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.”
    Gloria (pg 305)
  • “A pull on the sheets. Jaslyn looks down as Claire moves her left hand. The fingers go up and down as if playing a piano. The yellow rufflework of age. The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.”
    Jaslyn (pg 349)
  • “All those young girls outside selling their bodies. Looking like they would fall on their backs and use their spines as mattresses.”
  • “I figured I might write a play in a bar, as if it had never been done before, as if it were some sort of revolutionary act, so I listened to my countrymen and wrote notes. Theirs was a loneliness pasted upon loneliness. It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left”
  • “So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Family is like water—it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
    Highlighted by 709 Kindle customers
  • Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.
    Highlighted by 607 Kindle customers
  • The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
    Highlighted by 579 Kindle customers
  • I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
    Highlighted by 454 Kindle customers
  • There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.
    Highlighted by 453 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 436 Kindle customers
  • CORRIGAN TOLD ME once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.
    Highlighted by 355 Kindle customers
  • The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.
    Highlighted by 333 Kindle customers
  • Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
    Highlighted by 325 Kindle customers
  • I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
    Highlighted by 120 Kindle customers
Show all 33 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

Those who saw him hushed.

Table of Contents edit see section history

THOSE WHO SAW HIM HUSHED

Book One
All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here
Miró, Miró, on the Wall
A Fear of Love

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN FOREVER DOWN

Book Two
Tag
Etherwest
This Is the House That Horse Built

THE RINGING GROOVES OF CHANGE

Book Three
Part of the Parts
Centavos
All Hail and Hallelujah

Book Four
Roaring Seaward, and I Go

Glossary edit see section history

  • thrum: Make a continuous rhythmic humming sound
  • dolor: painful grief
  • pellucid: Translucently clear
  • novitiate: A place housing religious novices
  • TTP: Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) is a blood disorder that causes blood clots to form in small blood vessels around the body, and leads to a low platelet count
  • thrup: an adjective verb combo word to be used in the place of either an adjective or verb
  • emery: A grayish-black powdered mixture of corundum and magnetite, used as an abrasive

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in Amazon Book Club Picks. (authoritative list)
This book is in Rainy Day Books (12 Best Books of 2009). (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Colum McCann (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: New York: Random House
Country: USA
Publication Date: 23 June 2009
ISBN: 1400063736
Page Count: 368

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PR6063 .C335 L47 2009
  • Dewey: 823.914

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Zoli
  • This Side of Brightness
  • Dancer
  • Songdogs
  • Everything in This Country Must
  • Man on Wire   [MAN ON WIRE] [Paperback]
  • That Old Cape Magic

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • To Reach the Clouds
  • To Reach the Clouds
  • The Man Who Walked Between The Towers

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