Tim Combes’s Reviews > Let the Great World Spin > Status Update

"I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty."

"That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it’s hard to think you’ll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it’s just so comfortable you don’t want to have to develop your own."

I've seen the documentary Man on Wire and I don't recall if they mentioned that Nixon resigned the next day but that's a pretty crazy historical confluence

The switch between the first two narrators was a tough transition and I almost gave up. Glad I didn't.

"She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs—she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry."

"It pleased me a little to think that he had a flaw and that it went so deep that he couldn’t deal with it. Corrigan wanted other people’s pain. He didn’t want to deal with his own. I felt a pulse of shame too, for thinking that way."

“That’s what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.”

“What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties.”