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f925b88
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The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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44f7c39
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Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9f6b925
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Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him: Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight? They'd listen to my death. No final word? Last words are only words. You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell. I'd say I was not unhappy. You have nothing. It may be the last shall be first. Do you believe that? No. What ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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acbbf35
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God speaks in the least of creatures.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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944d1e1
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Dont let go. Okay. No matter what. No matter what.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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97922f2
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The boy's candlecolored skin was all but translucent.
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the-road
starvation
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Cormac McCarthy |
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17c89e1
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Okay. This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They dont give up. Okay.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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542f0b4
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He lives in a room above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook beast to fight with the sailors. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so f..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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69515db
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The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went to the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull glow rose in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9c1cfe3
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A rich smell of woodsmoke hung over the road.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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388ffa0
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By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew th..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f29db23
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He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not. He took up the tumbler the judge had poured and he drank and set it down again. He looked at the judge. I..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2c7da90
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In truth they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadnt drunk.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7b4554c
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Naw. Just us old country niggers. We kind of make it a point to call things for what they is. I'd hate to guess how many names they is for the jailhouse. I'd hate to have to count em.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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223271d
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guess he said cattle could tell the difference between a flight of geese and a cat on fire. Maybe
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9e0bab4
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That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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bbb055f
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watching the flames twist in the wind.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1f75852
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You aint ready for that.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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480a0ac
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The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9ef62d4
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For let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures. The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. 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.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8d65542
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They went through the last of the cars and then walked up the track to the locomotive and climbed up to the catwalk. Rust and scaling paint. They pushed into the cab and he blew away the ash from the engineer's seat and put the boy at the controls. The controls were very simple. Little to do but push the throttle lever forward. He made train noises and diesel horn noises but he wasn't sure what these might mean to the boy. After a while the..
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the-end
depressing
post-apocalyptic
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Cormac McCarthy |
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6a01e83
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He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up at last by the very void to which we wished to s..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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55cd51b
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No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d926232
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There aint no virtue in quittin what you aint able any longer to do in the first place.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3e81e1f
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If I was supposed to die over there doin what I'd give my word to do then that's what I should of done. You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn't. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I can't. I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didn't know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with i..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7edb505
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Black: The point is, Professor, that I aint got the first notion in the world about what makes God tick. I don't know why he spoke to me. I wouldnt of. White: But you listened. Black: Well what choice would you have? White: I don't know. Not listen? Black: How you goin to do that?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d1299e1
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I aint God.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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816d20f
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I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what... I knew t..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1ba9fa5
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Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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46befa2
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He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with vigor unknown to the sane. Suttree admired them with their hot eyes and dogeared bibles, God's barkers gone forth into the world like the prophets of old.
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street-preachers
suttree
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a98dc1e
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She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart.
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wolf
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Cormac McCarthy |
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00c394b
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The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld 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..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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18e4b54
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He told how he had seen the lies run down the lawyer's tongue. Vague but of a substance, they came down like mice and looked about a moment before scuttling off.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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aa88195
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Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9f2ab76
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One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everbody is goin to get older with you.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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dbe1fbb
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It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d625a77
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In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hate and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5b61f3d
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Meanin I guess that he seen somebody in a place low enough to where he ought to be ready to take a pretty big step.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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426dae3
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I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? You aint nothin. You speak truer than you know. But I will tell ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5ebd431
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Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall no..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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eec8727
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His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ff8d1b2
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They sat in the little diningroom and ate. She'd put on music, a violin concerto. The phone didnt ring. Did you take it off the hook? No, she said. Wires must be down. She smiled. I think it's just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think. Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then. Do you remember the last time it snowed here? No, I cant say as I do. Do you? Yes I do. When was it. It'll come to you. Oh. She smiled. They ate.
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love
serenity
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b822327
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His other few possessions lay about in the grotto where chance had arranged them.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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095759e
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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 aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
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Cormac McCarthy |