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Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.
Cormac McCarthy
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Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee. — The judge
Cormac McCarthy
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... words were said that could not be put right again...
Cormac McCarthy
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He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
Cormac McCarthy
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Nothing wounded goes uphill, he said. It just don't happen.
Cormac McCarthy
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The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
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Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
Cormac McCarthy
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For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?
Cormac McCarthy
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Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.
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What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
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This is a terrible place to die in.
Where's a good one?
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Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls.
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He (Wells) closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.
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I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.
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Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.
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The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
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If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.
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It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood, and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.
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Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.
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What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.
Cormac McCarthy
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By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.
Cormac McCarthy
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See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
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Just take me with you. Please. I cant. Please, Papa. I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
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I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.
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I don't aim to quit while I'm ahead. I just aim to quit.
Cormac McCarthy
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Cormac McCarthy
Born:
July 20, 1933
Died:
June 13, 2023
(aged 89)
Bio:
Cormac McCarthy was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and post-apocalyptic genres.
Known for:
The Road (2006)
Blood Meridian (1985)
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
No Country for Old Men (2005)
Child of God (1973)
Most used words:
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time
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Cormac McCarthy on Wikipedia
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