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38ab520
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He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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dc7173a
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They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded.
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literature
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5dc8403
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There, he said. You see? You see how this is bad for one's billiard game? This thinking? The French have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game. No evil is beyond them.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ca77f31
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The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing
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Cormac McCarthy |
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46f69c7
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Do you think horses understand what people say? I aint sure most people do.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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232d830
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He looked up. His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he'd been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3ee772d
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He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said. That's what you think. You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they'll hear the shot. Yes they will. But you wont. How do you figure that? Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They'll just be soup.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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821b90d
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Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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6e39bba
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From thinking about your sweet face between my legs.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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da23f3a
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I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life. Is that right? Aye. The kid turned the leather in his lap. The expriest watched him. At night, said Tobin, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears them grazing? Dont nobody hear them if they're asleep. Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes? Every man. Aye, said the expriest. Every man.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3218ff2
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Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs.
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similie
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Cormac McCarthy |
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fc602e3
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Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4469918
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When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.
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similie
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d93b267
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Housecats is smart too. Smarter'n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain't on account of you cain't learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won't learn nothin. They too smart.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b253c36
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She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3c8f39d
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He said that war had destroyed the country and that men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent's flesh for its bite. He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that whic..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ee05df4
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You got good eyes, she said. Yes mam, he said. I always did. Well I guess so, she said. You dont normally start out with bad ones and they get better.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f4d412e
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The shape of the city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4b1e34f
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I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.
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imortality
longing
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4b5285d
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Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings. The trail of the argonauts terminated in ashes as told and in the covergence of such vectors in such a waste wherein the hearts and enterprise of one small nation have been swallowed up and carried off by another the expriest asked if some might not see the hand of a cynical god conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a congruence. ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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667bf4e
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The sheriff shook his head. "Dope, he said. Dope." "They sell that shit to school kids." "It's worse than that." "How's that?" "School kids buy it."
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Cormac McCarthy |
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50c6c49
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There's a kind of man that when he cant have what he wants he wont take the next best thing but the worst he can find.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5415798
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I got no reason to be afraid of God. I've even got a bone or two to pick with Him.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7889940
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Glass flowers exploding. Slow trail of colors down the sky like stains dispersing in the sea, candescent polyps extinguished in the depths.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ccc0a54
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When it stops, you'll know you've heard it all your life.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9e08543
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The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8493e81
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They'd put an awning up over the gravesite but the weather was all sideways and it did no good.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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59b1558
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Betty, he said. Yes.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2d6b974
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The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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658845a
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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.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e0c8718
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You have to carry the fire.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0767aca
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And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly.
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dreams
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a58991a
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He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered look to it where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. He stepped down into the roadcut and he looked at the gun and he looked at the boy. Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wore a beard that had been cut square acro..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7ca2c85
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What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ee274e1
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Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a ho..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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90e94f0
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The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, a..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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53485ca
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You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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33587fd
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We could of brought weeners, she said. Yeah. Marshmallers. You wouldnt think a car would burn like that.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ff658b2
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Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever,
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Cormac McCarthy |
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bc2737d
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There's two kinds of people that dont ask a lot of questions. One is too dumb to and the other dont need to.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5aa1466
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He rose and stood tottering in that cold dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination... Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the u..
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the-road
direction
night
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f8d1561
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The faint light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7bbbf9e
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Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2ff8644
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How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.
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Cormac McCarthy |