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I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Cormac McCarthy
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I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.
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Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge
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Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didn't change.
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You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.
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Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
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He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.
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There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy.
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The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.
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It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.
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The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.
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Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. — The judge
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There ain't but one truth, said John Grady. The truth is what happened. It ain't what come out of somebody's mouth.
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It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.
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The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.
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The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.
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He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.
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In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.
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They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.
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The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
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The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full.
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The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
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I dont know what I ever done, she said. I truly dont. Chigurh nodded. Probably you do, he said. There's a reason for everything. She shook her head. How many times I've said them very words. I wont again.
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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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Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.
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)
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