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cb7bcb2
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Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e2037a2
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See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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aec3857
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Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a20be38
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They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d02cf2f
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Dark of the invisible moon. The night now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b4fda71
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For this will to deceive that is in thing luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies
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Cormac McCarthy |
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71562b8
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They sat on a bench and Sproule held his wounded arm to his chest and rocked back and forth and blinked in the sun. What do you want to do? said the kid. Get a drink of water. Other than that. I dont know. You want to try and head back? To Texas? I don't know where else. We'd never make it. Well you say. I aint got no say. He was coughing again. He held his chest with his good hand and sat as if he'd get his breath. What have you got, a c..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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de8254c
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He lifted the slice of cake and bit into it and turned the page. The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old dis..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9f6e2e0
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The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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c670667
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But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f90365f
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They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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10d358c
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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 |
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60390ad
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I dont know what I ever done, she said. I truly dont. Chigurh nodded. Probably you do, he said. There's a reason for everything. She shook her head. How many times I've said them very words. I wont again.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5a2d1a5
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Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ea52b8c
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He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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72bf034
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I got here the same way the coin did.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0c9c0bd
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Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone. She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.
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strangers
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8308e62
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The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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c7ca192
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Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him.
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faith
god
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e5f8a39
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How do I know you're one of the good guys? You dont. You'll have to take a shot. Are you carrying the fire? Am I what? Carrying the fire. You're kind of weirded out, arent you? No. Just a little. Yeah. That's okay. So are you? What, carrying the fire? Yes. Yeah, We are.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e445ccb
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There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.
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confusion
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Cormac McCarthy |
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1b18ec1
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The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? ... The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b79ebf6
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I've seen all I want to see and I know all I want to know. I just look forward to death. He might hear you, Suttree said. I wisht he would, said the ragpicker. He glared out across the river with his redrimmed eyes at the town where dusk was settling in. As if death might be hiding in that quarter. No one wants to die. Shit, said the ragpicker. Here's one that's sick of livin. Would you give all you own? The ragman eyed him suspiciously but..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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01d901e
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in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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59f3976
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Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f5cb46d
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He looked into those blue eyes like a man seeking some vision of the increate future of the universe.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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229cf5c
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White pussy is nothin but trouble.
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women
white-people
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Cormac McCarthy |
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3b4e4cc
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In the spaniards heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love for truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f08e6c8
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This is a terrible place to die in. Where's a good one?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5d6c4e4
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If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.
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war
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d44a195
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And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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803be53
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If fate is the law, then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It's in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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eec6388
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Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that mazeis itself an enslavement for it voids every alternate and binds one ever more tightly in to the constraints that make a life.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e4f8944
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The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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94bc7d3
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There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5045b6f
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We're carrying the fire.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0c5adcd
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You either stick or you quit. And I wouldnt quit you I dont care what you done.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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191e551
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For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which ..
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world
life
stories
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Cormac McCarthy |
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c01898b
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Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away? It was in 1884. Did he die by natural causes? No sir. And what were the circumstances surrounding his death? He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way. Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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eaad1ce
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You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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fd716cd
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They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape. Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid..
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violence
landscape
desert
journey
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Cormac McCarthy |
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cbfce4e
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We used to talk about death, she said. We don't anymore. Why is that? I don't know. It's because it's here. There's nothing left to talk about. I wouldn't leave you. I don't care. It's meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I've taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. O yes he is. Please don't do this. I'm sorry. I can't do it alone.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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24d9101
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How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
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solitude
death
life
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7134f67
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Easy to see that naught save sorrow could bring a man to such a view of things. And yet a sorrow for which there can be no help is no sorrow. It is some dark sister traveling in sorrow's clothing. Men do not turn from God so easily you see. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never ..
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Cormac McCarthy |