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Quotes from Let the Great World Spin — Colum McCann

born 1965 Ireland

← All quotes by Colum McCann

21 quotes

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.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Yet nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Perhaps it's chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Everything had purpose, signal, meaning.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Hours and hours of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

War was a get-together of the vain.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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.

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Colum McCann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.