Let the Great World Spin
Quotes from the Book
Not a single atom in our bodies today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replaced many times over. We flake away and become new. Whatever we are now, we are not the stuff from which we were originally made. All the people we once were. All the people we had once hoped to be.
What was it Pascal had written? All of our problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
I suppose we go out to sea because we want, eventually, to come home. I know this now, but it was new to me then. The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.
Just because the truth is ignored doesn’t mean it’s not true.
If the ocean was a bank, they’d have saved it a long time ago.
It was no great surprise that the world felt as if it were in chains since they actually trawled the ocean floor and tied us up in easy knots.
The most casual things can, after all, twist our tired hearts.
Everything gets fixed and we all stay broken.
Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Ta-Nehisi Coates
The wonder of things is that they were ever created in the first place. Maybe that was the simplicity we needed. Everything is made to be disassembled. Not all of it can be repaired. All there is is the trying.
The mind begs for logic but gets the actual world. We fall back on invention.
Stupid to think that our wine will never turn.
Nothing, not even words, can stop the flow of time.
Who can say where anything truly begins? The cloud, the raindrop, the original speck of dust around which water collects? We can only ever locate the middle when we get to the end. And then, at the absolute end, what’s the point in finding the middle, or even the beginning?
The backspin of memory lands us in the strangest of places.
The days come and go. They bird themselves against the widow and end up at our, stunned.
the flotsam of our longings, the jetsam of our truths,
There’s an odd grace in not just settling for the simple Fuck off.
can’t go on, must go on
There was something very calm and unrushed about him. If there was a clock inside him instructing time it was ticking slower than the time pieces inside of the rest of us. It wasn’t that he tamped down the moment or tightened it or obscured it. On the contrary he gave air to it, let it hover, made it new.
The wild crunch of coincidence...
If you can’t shake something free you go back and grasp it.
There is no logic. The world is messy. The answers lie in the beyond.
I suppose we end up surviving by our ability to forget.
takotsubo, which had surfaced in my mind on the very first day
I felt myself floating towards the shadow of the dreamer I once had been.
She whispered my name and she sounded like the first person ever to say it.
I was hooked on the plot of the waves.
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About Colum McCann
About the book
A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at unfathomable depths.
Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extrao
Book details
- First published
- 2025
- Author
- Colum McCann
- Genre
- Fiction
- Goodreads rating
- 3.69 (9k ratings) →
The buzz
- The New York TimesReview in The New York Timesprofessional review (via Book Marks)
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Keep reading
Let the Great World Spin
Kafka on the Shore
Spin
Killing Commendatore
The Dead-Tossed Waves
The Stardust Grail
Aquarium
The Gap of Time
The Quiet Game
The Raw Shark Texts
The Stone Gods
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
How High We Go in the Dark
Acceptance
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World
11/22/63
The Future
The Hour I First Believed
All the Light We Cannot See
M Train
Year of the Monkey
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
The Year of Magical Thinking
The Glass Hotel
The Toll
The Atopia Chronicles
Brother Odd
My Friends
The Dream of Perpetual Motion
House of Leaves
Endymion
The Book of Tomorrow
Turtles All the Way Down
The Covenant of Water
Housekeeping
We Are Water
The Shock of the Fall
Fugitive Pieces
Any Human Heart
The Illusion of Separateness
Dark Matter
The Light Between Oceans
The Stone Diaries
Winter
There Are Rivers in the Sky
Sea of Tranquility
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Nod
The Tsar of Love and Techno
I Cheerfully Refuse
Lighthousekeeping
The Angel Esmeralda
The Handmaid's Tale
The Palace of Illusions
The Clockmaker's Daughter
Playground
The Fall
Saint X
Chances Are...
A Fire Upon the Deep

