e0d3ddd
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Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
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Cormac McCarthy |
57090cf
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He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. 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. He tried to remember the dream but he could not. All that was left was the feeling..
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Cormac McCarthy |
b12f16e
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They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.
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Cormac McCarthy |
9885054
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Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
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pain
writing
driving-forces
hardship
creative-process
creation
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Cormac McCarthy |
052a486
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The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.
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unusual
hopeful
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Cormac McCarthy |
c8ec58b
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This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history..
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fate
war
history
destiny
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Cormac McCarthy |
13bb4be
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He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while..
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stars
constellations
wild
sky
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Cormac McCarthy |
ec35109
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Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.
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freedom
social-contract
state-of-nature
the-west
frontier
libertarianism
solidarity
mercy
liberty
individualism
liberalism
justice
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Cormac McCarthy |
51b5fb6
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I read in the papers here a while back some teachers came across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in th..
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Cormac McCarthy |
f35debf
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He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. He slept little and he slept poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orch..
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Cormac McCarthy |
1e89fdf
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We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we? No. Of course not. Even if we were starving? We're starving now. You said we werent. I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving. But we wouldnt. No. We wouldnt. No matter what. No. No matter what. Because we're the good guys. Yes. And we're carrying the fire.
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Cormac McCarthy |
f107f91
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The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.
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Cormac McCarthy |
b52e007
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I was afraid I was going to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.
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Cormac McCarthy |
f653b21
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Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge
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Cormac McCarthy |
31bac84
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The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here. Yeah. You don't think that's so great. It's okay.
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Cormac McCarthy |
58ec79b
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The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the 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 |
a346e75
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He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
3e4308e
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They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they were augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear abo..
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Cormac McCarthy |
6ec08c7
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Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murdere..
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Cormac McCarthy |
f836fd2
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He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.
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Cormac McCarthy |
a87d7ea
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He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is.
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Cormac McCarthy |
cb947a7
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Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference...I got set next to this woman...she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it...She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I..
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Cormac McCarthy |
30d8b6a
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If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.
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atavism
race
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Cormac McCarthy |
4af622b
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No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It's never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?
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life
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Cormac McCarthy |
3ab012d
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I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the begin..
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Cormac McCarthy |
80bb434
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I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamour and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective inste..
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suicide
religion
life
salvation
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Cormac McCarthy |
952f3b7
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You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
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Cormac McCarthy |
b8172e1
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and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.
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Cormac McCarthy |
b1f3c9c
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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 throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, Oh God.
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Cormac McCarthy |
36b8270
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In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is m..
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nature-and-man
meaninglessness
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Cormac McCarthy |
67135a9
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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. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
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dreams
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Cormac McCarthy |
9e7a2f3
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There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.
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Cormac McCarthy |
f747bde
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All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.
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Cormac McCarthy |
ea9ec6a
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Maybe you could just keep that in reserve. Maybe just take a shot at startin over. I dont mean start again. Everybody's done that. Over means over. It means you walk away. I mean, if everthing you are and everthing you have and everthing you have done has brought you at last to the bottom of a whiskey bottle or bought you a one way ticket on the Sunset Limited then you cant give me the first reason on God's earth for salvagin none of it. Ca..
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Cormac McCarthy |
0e183fc
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He told the boy that although he was 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 passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
f3acdf3
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They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectura..
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Cormac McCarthy |
7c64016
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Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.
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Cormac McCarthy |
fd3df65
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I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it
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Cormac McCarthy |
d2ebc76
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When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.
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Cormac McCarthy |
e0e3f36
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I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.
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Cormac McCarthy |
fd8f6ea
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If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.
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Cormac McCarthy |
01831c8
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Just take me with you. Please. I cant. Please, Papa. I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
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father
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Cormac McCarthy |
ce06345
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He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. 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 t..
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the-sea
sea
ocean
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Cormac McCarthy |
987dff5
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The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.
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Cormac McCarthy |