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192e8cb
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Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0d7e49b
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He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness. He said these things to me with great earnestness and great gentleness and in the light from the portal I could see tha..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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eebc7f8
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It's a mystery. 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 so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. 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...
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hobbesian
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a79c5dc
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As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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40a1a12
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In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7cd6866
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Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8f3ff0a
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Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e257e44
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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. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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348674a
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He didn't say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don't remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8387455
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You never know when you'll be in need of them you've despised,
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Cormac McCarthy |
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c422a28
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Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a8c521f
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What is it? Nothing. I had a bad dream. What did you dream about? Nothing. Are you okay? No. He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said. I was crying. But you didnt wake up. I'm sorry. I was just so tired. I meant in the dream.
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fear
love
comfort-of-love
fear-of-losing-loved-ones
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0fa8671
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Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2d98e8b
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The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him. The smell of coalsmoke in the air at night. Old times, dead years. For him such memories are bitter ones.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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73db597
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Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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96ab7d7
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Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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64c438f
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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 name 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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dd5494a
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They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0e03979
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Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said
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Cormac McCarthy |
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abe7519
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The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like t..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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be7aed3
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It is community and respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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96cf418
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He said that even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering and he thought that he'd guessed out likewise for the living a nominal grief like a grange from which disaster and ruin are proportioned by laws of equity too subtle for divining.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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6020627
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Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f561c8d
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There is no later. This is later.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f9d872a
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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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5664018
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It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody's. You don't start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin? You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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65f0e81
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Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b258bbf
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Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d3bc984
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Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein...
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9dba276
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I think sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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14ea2f3
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A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will 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. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ul..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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36f9b87
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There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ccb6d8d
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I know all the people I want to know.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5e3f0a0
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The hardest lesson in the world: Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b60ec32
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For things at a common destination there is a common path. Not always easy to see. But there.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a25cbbd
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And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4e94440
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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 |
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aed130d
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You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a1d9f5a
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All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8017db6
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She said that her grandmother was skeptical of many things in this world and of none more than men. She said that in every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die. Her grandmother spoke to her often of men and she spoke with great earnestness and she said that rash men were a great temptation to women and this was simply a misfortune like others and there was little that could be done to remedy it. She said that to b..
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why-girls-like-bad-boys
women-s-desire-for-protection
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a53105c
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Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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45ea646
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Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see tha..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9d539c0
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he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all
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Cormac McCarthy |
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17a4354
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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. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.
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Cormac McCarthy |