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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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desert
journey
landscape
violence
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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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death
life
solitude
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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 |
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0b1a936
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Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.
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grief
heartache
sorry
tragedy
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5964264
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He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.
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love
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Cormac McCarthy |
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47f7f59
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That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I don't think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around that bend and then flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e193a8e
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Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a6dc8bc
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I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8236bdd
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He said I was bein hard on myself. Said it was a sign of old age. Tryin to set things right. I guess there's some truth to that. But it aint the whole truth. I agreed with him that there wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I waited for him to smile but he didn't. I said well, that's pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the fac..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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216fd14
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A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled. Books lie, he said. God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8c7b892
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I want the dead to be dead forever. I don't want to be one of them, Except of course you can't be one of them. You can't be one of the dead because that which, has no existence can have no community. No community! My heart warms just thinking about it-- blackness, aloneness ,silence, peace, and all of it only a heartbeat away.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e2d2b2c
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For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5a0ba40
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The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall
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Cormac McCarthy |
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8142d2e
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People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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bce5433
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Where you've nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air, and breathe upon them.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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b77d2fd
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He turned and looked at the boy. Standing with his suitcase like an orphan waiting for a bus.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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99ada0f
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That the boy was all that stood between him and death.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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501cb60
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The following night she came to his bed and she came every night for nine nights running, pushing the door shut and latching it and turning in the slatted light at God knew what hour and stepping out of her clothes and sliding cool and naked against him in the narrow bunk all softness and perfume and the lushness of her black hair falling over him and no caution to her at all. Saying I dont care I dont care. Drawing blood with her teeth whe..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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c20e7e4
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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 into that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4ccb78b
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Ever is a long time.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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f4cc97e
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Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity. a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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007e4d6
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The frailty of everything, revealed at last.
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Cormac McCarthy (Author) |
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7cfc594
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He asked her out and she told him she wouldnt go out with a man that drank. He looked her straight in the eye and told her he didnt drink. She like to fell over backwards. I guess it come as somethin of a shock to her to meet a even bigger liear than what she was. But he told the naked truth. Of course she called hishand on it. Said she knew for a fact he drank. Said everbody in Jeff Davis County knew he drank and drank plenty and was wild ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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eaa1dfc
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Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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9d6eccc
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Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether. He listened. Above the black ranks of trees the mid-summer sky arched cloudless and coldly starred. He lay back and stared at it and after a while he slep..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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14bfd20
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In a world darksome as this'n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most.
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blindness
darksome
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Cormac McCarthy |
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caf2e76
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You don't know shit from apple butter.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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7d3f50b
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A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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aaf7ab4
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Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0f25fcd
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in that cold autistic dark.
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life-and-death
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a2e01e6
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The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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553a288
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Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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89351c4
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The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror that men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d51860a
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Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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5ca335c
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I'd rather to make a good run as a bad stand.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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e341494
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He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to th waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entable..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0ead177
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You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess i..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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ea6b50e
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They's lots of work in this world that aint never paid for. But the accounts gets balanced anyway. In the long run. A man that contracts for work and then dont pay for it, the world will reckon with him fore it's out. With the worker too. You live long enough and you'll see it. They's a ledger kept that the pages dont never get old nor crumbly nor the ink dont never fade. If it dont balance then they aint no right in this world and if they ..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2813324
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A malign star kept him.
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Cormac McCarthy |
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c1f6ad5
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Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.
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disbelief
god
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Cormac McCarthy |
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a10fdc3
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He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.
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fate
luck
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Cormac McCarthy |
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2869399
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Long voyages often lose themselves. Mam? You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all. Listen to the corridos of the country. They will tell you. Then you will see in your own life what is the cost of things. Perhaps it is true that nothing is hidd..
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Cormac McCarthy |
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0a27679
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The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing's inside and can you guess his shape? Where he's kept or what's the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a time warp, a carder of souls from the world's nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his dead cart throug..
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Cormac McCarthy |