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a665b67
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My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you're sorry and get on with it. Don't haul stuff around with you.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4f284a4
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The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstitiion will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. I dont see what t..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d5f009f
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I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.
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distance
perspective
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a511505
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Carry the fire.
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emotion
hope
prophecy
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1efb06f
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Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing...
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2e78d78
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Scared money can't win and a worried man can't love.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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62539d5
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What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3e90887
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Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2eda084
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Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.
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life
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4c177ea
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From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3d21a54
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The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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97c84c1
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I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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6b7fb32
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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. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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6395c7a
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The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.
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love
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Cormac McCarthy |
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89cdfd0
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They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely j..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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94681dd
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I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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68839b0
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The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.
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the-judge
superstition
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Cormac McCarthy |
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431335c
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He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.
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loss
parenting
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e5fbc4e
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Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?
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morality
cormac-mccarthy
the-road
selfishness
survival
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Cormac McCarthy |
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adfac27
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He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f15da56
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He shook his head. You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesn't allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people don't believe that there can be such a person. You see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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946df1a
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Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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533c3b7
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Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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53b455f
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He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. 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. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
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mccarthy
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0a657d1
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Dope. They sell that shit to schoolkids. It's worse than that. How's that? Schoolkids buy it.
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drugs
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Cormac McCarthy |
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93378ca
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Then don't. I can't help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll ..
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saying-goobye
wife
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7b561f8
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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.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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564eea1
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In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f7489a6
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A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ulti..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5c0169c
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Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea's black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d6cf4f2
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They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.
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sunrise
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1cb77da
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Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3d7ad31
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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 cant. 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 it I knew how but it still wasn't mine. It never has been.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5e1e25b
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Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one m..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4bd702e
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Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4ff18fc
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There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. No..
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story
world
imagination
tale
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Cormac McCarthy |
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24e1066
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And what happens then? When? After you're dead. Dont nothing happen. You're dead. You told me once you believed in God. The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could. What would you say to him? Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7fff298
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It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight...
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e25f5d6
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Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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94f1c8a
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Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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084427f
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How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1b7a949
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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.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4d5fb8b
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It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow di..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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533d4fb
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In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.
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Cormac McCarthy |