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5b3e403
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What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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89b8d73
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See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed & the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history & will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns & cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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cdbc7ae
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So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5a0de4e
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When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.
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outer-dark
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Cormac McCarthy |
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949750b
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He is dancing, dancing. He says he'll never die.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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61ddecb
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A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly
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Cormac McCarthy |
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cc39ccd
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God made this world, but he didn't make it to suit everybody, did he?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e745287
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A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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78ad4fa
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He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f7f37c3
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Where men cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true. Things will be better when everybody's gone.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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fcc9dee
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What you wants with these goats anyway? Little or nothin. Good fresh milk. God's best cheese. You have any other animals? said Suttree. Dog or anything? No. Just goats. I think a feller gets started with goats he just more or less sticks to goats.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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77e2d1a
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That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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87ac3a6
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Suttree ducked the yardlong coil of dead flies that hung from the ceiling and came to the counter with his purchases.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f215a92
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Where the bodies are buried in the desert is a certain world, Counselor. Where they are simply left in the street is another. That is a country heretofore unknown to me. But it must have always been there, must it not?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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34761ec
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Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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857ec62
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To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. 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 universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
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the-road
existentialism
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3f5206f
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A ceremony then. One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly known as a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling in the breas..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7c021b9
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He was dressed in odd and garish fashion and his clothes were embroidered with signs that had about them the geometric look of instructions, perhaps a game. He wore jewelry of jade and silver and his hair was long and blacker than his age would seem to warrant. He told the boy that although he was a huerfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a p..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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804f4a6
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Boyd aint goin nowhere. If I am he is. Boyd's a juvenile. They aint goin to turn him over to you. Hell. You're a juvenile yourself. I aint askin.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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67f5df2
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IN THE SPRING OR WARMER weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. Ballard
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7b23b13
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The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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56edfe2
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I think it's just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think. Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e1331d1
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Forty minutes later he saw her and stopped and sat the horse and watched. She was riding along a red dirt ridge to the south sitting with her hands crossed on the pommel, looking toward the last of the sun, the horse slogging slowly through the loose sandy dirt, the red stain of it following them in the still air. That's my heart yonder, he told the horse. It always was.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f1d4229
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What if a whole goddamned building was to just up and sink? What about two or three buildings? What about a whole block? Harrogate was waving his bottle about. Goddamn, he said. What if the whole fuckin city was to cave in? That's the spirit, said Suttree.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7c40376
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They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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63f3f5a
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Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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15794a5
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The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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dceeb7a
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I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics
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Cormac McCarthy |
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882b3ee
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There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ece9f40
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Trust me, Moss said. I hate hearin them words, the driver said. I always did. Have you ever said them? Yeah. I've said em. That's how come I know what they're worth.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b8bff3e
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Do I think you're crazy? he said. No. I dont. You've rewrote the book for crazy. If all you are is crazy then all them poor bastards in the loonybin that they're feedin under the door need to be set loose in the street.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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244f6f8
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Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian. Let's go then. Hump up there, stranger, and let's go get hung.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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81f8b2c
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They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2d1b615
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Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a22f3c1
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This night, thy soul may be required of thee.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f36f2ae
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The kid looked at the man. His head was strangely narrow and his hair was plastered up with mud in a bizarre and primitive coiffure. On his forehead were burned the letters H T and lower and almost between the eyes the letter F and these markings were splayed and garish as if the iron had been left too long. When he turned to look at the kid the kid could see that he had no ears.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8e43241
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Listen Sut. We're painted into a corner anyways. I mean what if we was to just call up and say he died? I mean hell fire, you caint fool them guys. Them guys is doctors. They take one look at him and know for a fact he's been dead six months. How does it smell in there? It smells fuckin awful.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1aa4f35
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Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam's flank.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1d3969f
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For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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6fc317b
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He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f7181b5
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Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.
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sleep
funeral
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e621c18
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The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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93038d0
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Here beyond men's judgements all covenants were brittle.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5262d86
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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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motivation
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Cormac McCarthy |