Cormac McCarthy Quotes - Page 10

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

Cormac McCarthy

Tides, One Thing

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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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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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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 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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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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The point is there ain't no point.

Cormac McCarthy

Nihilism, Existentialism, No Point

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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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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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She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

Cormac McCarthy

Moving, Eye, Light

Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.136, Pan Macmillan

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Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.

Cormac McCarthy

Heart, Men, Shapes

Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.108, Pan Macmillan

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Where men can't live gods fare no better.

Cormac McCarthy

Men

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In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned 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.

Cormac McCarthy

Believe, Blood, Knowing

Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.227, Pan Macmillan

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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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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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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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The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

Cormac McCarthy

Stars, Lying, Fall

Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.16, Pan Macmillan

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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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What is it? Nothing. I had a bad dream. What did you dream about? Nothing. Are you okay? No. He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said. I was crying. But you didnt wake up. I'm sorry. I was just so tired. I meant in the dream.

Cormac McCarthy

Dream, Sorry, Tired

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Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

Cormac McCarthy

Memories, Past, Men

Cormac McCarthy (2015). “Blood Meridian: Picador Classic”, p.348, Pan Macmillan

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Cormac McCarthy

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Born: July 20, 1933
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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