Cormac McCarthy Quotes - Page 10

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I got here the same way the coin did.

Cormac McCarthy

Coins, Way

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “No Country for Old Men”, p.169, Pan Macmillan

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So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

Cormac McCarthy

Fall, Taken, World

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Crossing: Book 2 of The Border Trilogy”, p.143, Vintage

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Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein.

Cormac McCarthy

Drama, Eye, Fire

"Suttree". Book by Cormac McCarthy (p. 4), May 1979.

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He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Cormac McCarthy

Horse, Stars, Dark

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It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing.

Cormac McCarthy

Tides, One Thing

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How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.

Cormac McCarthy

Men, Differences, Earth

Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.143, Vintage

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He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

Cormac McCarthy

Men, Forgiving, Mind

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Cities of the Plain”, p.208, Pan Macmillan

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The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Cormac McCarthy

Giving Up, Ideas, Soul

"Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" by Richard B. Woodward, archive.nytimes.com. April 19, 1992.

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If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?

Cormac McCarthy

Men, Race, Done

Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.154, Pan Macmillan

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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.

Cormac McCarthy

Believe, Men, Blood

Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.331, Pan Macmillan

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He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.

Cormac McCarthy

Believe, Saws, Cold

Cormac McCarthy (2012). “All the Pretty Horses”, p.260, Pan Macmillan

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He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Cormac McCarthy

Memories, Party, Reality

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Road film tie-in”, p.139, Pan Macmillan

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Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.

Cormac McCarthy

Community, Suffering, Hell

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.559, Pan Macmillan

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The point is there ain't no point.

Cormac McCarthy

Nihilism, Existentialism, No Point

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All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.

Cormac McCarthy

Order, Ruins, Mystery

Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.153, Pan Macmillan

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Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

Cormac McCarthy

Doe, Queries

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Road film tie-in”, p.32, Pan Macmillan

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He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him.

Cormac McCarthy

Taken, Heart, Simple

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Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.

Cormac McCarthy

Men, Way, Standing

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Cities of the Plain”, p.290, Pan Macmillan

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Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

Cormac McCarthy

Moving, Choices, Bidding

Cormac McCarthy (2007). “No Country for Old Men”, p.259, Vintage

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This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.

Cormac McCarthy

Country, People, Heartbeat

"The Road". Book by Cormac McCarthy, www.theguardian.com. September 26, 2006.

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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.

Cormac McCarthy

Quality, Hazards, Matter

Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.223, Pan Macmillan

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They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

Cormac McCarthy

Men, Blood, Order

Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.160, Pan Macmillan

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Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

Cormac McCarthy

Men, Migrants, Shells

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Road”, p.28, Pan Macmillan

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Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?

Cormac McCarthy

Communication, Circus, Towns

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But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?

Cormac McCarthy

Men, Soul, Say Anything

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Cormac McCarthy

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Born: July 20, 1933
Occupation: Novelist
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