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b7220ca
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On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2ec9908
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The judge watched him. He began to point out various men in the room and to ask if these men were here for a good time or if indeed they knew why they were here at all. Everybody dont have to have a reason to be someplace. That's so, said the judge. They do not have to have a reason. But order is not set aside because of their indifference.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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228d001
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I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don't wake up forever.
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war
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Cormac McCarthy |
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81d03ce
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Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ebb1caa
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Riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bo..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f0a2cd6
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Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man..
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loss
great
novels
honor
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e5173df
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Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3ee09f0
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I want the dead to be dead forever. I don't want to be one of them, Except of course you can't be one of them. You can't be one of the dead because that which, has no existence can have no community. No community! My heart warms just thinking about it-- blackness, aloneness,silence, peace,
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Cormac McCarthy |
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305500d
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If we do not know ourselves in the waking world, what chance in dreams?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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01cf07c
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Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly behind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of childhood. This is the day to sha..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2993e03
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Truth has no temperature.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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18a5c01
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There are other good guys. You said so. Yes. So where are they? They're hiding. Who are they hiding from? From each other.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b8b5354
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When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
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world
post-apocalypse
first-lines
parental-love
night
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Cormac McCarthy |
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c1b6cf6
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The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen for what they are.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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c34ee36
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You think God looks out for people?...I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you're done there's wars and ruination and all hell. You don't know what's goin to happen. I'd say He's just about go to. I don't believe we'd make it a day otherwise.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3e5572d
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They rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain again. In that gray storm light they crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea whereon they trod miraculous. They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chit..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a421205
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And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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548383c
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I've lot a lot of friends over these last few years. Not all of em older than me neither. One of the things you realize about gettin older is that no everbody is goin to get older with you.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f9c8968
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The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ccb0bfc
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It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4692476
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Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b506f8b
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The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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382ca7d
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Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9b2d62f
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She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.
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why-girls-like-bad-boys
women-s-desire-for-protection
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ac4dfac
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In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.
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responsibility
world
life
helpless
impotent
impotence
willingness
letter
willing
streets
law
helplessness
government
father
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d02362e
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That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9384833
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Your old man called me. He wanted you to call home. People in hell want ice water.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f8609fe
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When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9e796cf
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When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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380b7b5
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In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.
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life-lessons
growing-up
wishful-thinking
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ca517bb
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The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.
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nature
heart
life
cellular
overripe
pump
loveless
warfare
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b53bace
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Do you think God knows what's happenin? I expect he does. You think he can stop it? No. I dont.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8201406
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a bad map is worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside these instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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6d29e35
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The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. How could there be? At whose behest? This man did not cease to believe in God. Nor did he come to have some modern view of God. There was God and there ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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94f5246
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Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1df6761
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His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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32c903e
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You might think you could run away and change your name and I don't know what all. Start over. And then one mornin' you wake up and look at the ceilin' and guess who's layin' there?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3048b48
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Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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25e9c11
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A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the churchbells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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003efa6
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Those who cannot see must rely upon what has gone before. If I do not wish to appear so foolish as to drink from an empty glass I must remember whether I have drained it or not.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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90b0918
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With the final onset of dark the iron cold locked down and the boy by now was shuddering violently. No moon rose beyond the murk and there was nowhere to go.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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eb60a91
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They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart.
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inspirational
heartbreaking
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4031298
|
He woke whimpering in the night and the man held him. Shh, he said. Shh. It's okay. I had a bad dream. I know. Should I tell you what it was? If you want to. I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary. Okay. It was a lot scarier in the dream. I know. Dreams can be really scar..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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81c288b
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What you put in your head is there forever.
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Cormac McCarthy |