Let The Great World Spin Quotes & Sayings

My Beloved One gleams like the lightning flash in the sky. — Kabir

The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps. — Frantz Fanon

Outside the train, the world went by, and somewhere above him in the sky, a plane flew away, and objects in motion would stay in motion, and objects at rest would stay at rest. Isaac Newton -- the real one, the one Isaac had been named after -- had figured out that law, and a law wasn't a theory, it was a law. The air Rick had breathed out was still in Isaac's apartment, and the sheets still smelled like him, and there were little parts of him everywhere, and someday he'd come home, and against the great scale of universal time, a few months wasn't long at all. Before Isaac even knew it, they'd be together. The train would rock its way down the tracks and Rick's airplane would fly west and the planet would rotate and the solar system would turn and the galaxy would spin and the universe would keep on expanding, and with enough time, everything in it would again be made right. — Shukyou

To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics. — Terry Eagleton

Science is an inherent contradiction - systematic wonder - applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming's eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it - a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria - and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory? — Thomas Lewis

Most of 'Let the Great World Spin' is centered on the day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, creating an astonishing spectacle that intersects with the lives of many of the novel's multiple protagonists. — Susan Barker

The deep spaces between stars , Fathomless as the cold shadow His mind cast. — R.S. Thomas

When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions. — Calvin Coolidge

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways:1st - When they are neglected in infancy2nd - When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them.3rd - When they are paid low wages for their labour — Robert Owen

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It's all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you. — Colum McCann

With her words, the world could spin again. It took great restraint to not unfurl my wings and fly Abby around the mountain, pronouncing to anyone with ears that she loved me. Abigail Miller loved me. — Ashlan Thomas

Whenever he remembered this moment, it lasted forever: a flash of complete separateness as Lydia disappeared beneath the surface. Crouched on the dock, he had a glimpse of the future: without her, he would be completely alone. In the instant after, he knew it would change nothing. He could feel the ground still tipping beneath him. Even without Lydia, the world would not level. He and his parents and their lives would spin into the space where she had been. They would be sucked into the vacuum she left behind.

More than this: the second he touched her, he knew that he had misunderstood everything. When his palms hit her shoulders, when the water closed over her head, Lydia had felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful. She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn't want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much. — Celeste Ng

When I was racing, we were more used to seeing some horrific accidents. For example, Michael Schumacher is a great world champion, but I haven't seen a weekend where he doesn't go off the circuit. At every race he always has a spin or runs through the gravel trap. He usually doesn't hit anything, but nevertheless it is an error that could not have been made in the days I raced. — Jackie Stewart

Men today were half-made, and women were half-made. Creatures that existed and functioned with certain regularity, but which ran off into a hopeless jumble of inconsequence.
Half-made, like insects that can run fast and be so busy and suddenly grow wings, but which are only winged grubs after all. A world of half-made creatures on two legs, eating food and degrading the one mystery left to them, sex. Spinning a great lot of words, burying themselves inside the cocoons of words and ideas that they spin round themselves, and inside the cocoons, mostly perishing inert and overwhelmed. — D.H. Lawrence

Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all at once, twice, three times. — Colum McCann

'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on. — Colum McCann

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else. — Colum McCann

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated. — Robert Henri

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.
'My own sons,' he said.
We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside. — Colum McCann

The tightrope walk was an act of creation that seemed to stand in direct defiance to the act of destruction twenty-seven years later.
About Let the Great World Spin — Colum McCann

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution. — Eric Hoffer