1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
2676
2677
2678
2679
2680
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f994f29 | Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes. The kid didn't answer. The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he? I don't believe he much had me in mind. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 9330f0b | Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 06827db | and when he saw the kid standing there looking looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| e9d9807 | 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. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appal.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 34146f5 | My daddy once told me that some of the most miserable people he ever knew were the ones that finally got what they'd always wanted. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| c78c5e4 | By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker. | inspirational | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 9d80cd6 | If I didnt have her I dont know what I would have. Well, yes I do. You wouldnt need a box to put it in, neither. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 6a45b1e | If I dont go will you go anyways? John Grady sat up and put his hat on. I'm already gone, he said. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 8eba0e6 | he..said..in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man's flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, night-soil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| c31f7e0 | Even in this world, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. | mccarthy | Cormac McCarthy | |
| fc1ae6a | He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| ec884af | Every man's death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale? | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 285f230 | It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| abfb3b8 | I dont know what happens to country. | borders frontier loss | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 77ccf29 | He'd watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| d3a21fb | Foreign stars in the nights down there. A whole new astronomy Mensa, Musca, the Chameleon. Austral constellations nigh unknown to northern folk. Wrinkling, fading, through the cold black waters. As he rocks in his rusty pannier to the sea's floor in a drifting stain of guano. What family has no mariner in its tree? No fool, no felon. No fisherman. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 94cdf65 | The tinker in his burial tree was a wonder to the birds. The vultures that came by day to nose with their hooked beaks among his buttons and pockets like outrageous pets soon left him naked of his rags and flesh alike. Black mandrake sprang beneath the tree as it will where the seed of the hanged falls and in spring a new branch pierced his breast and flowered in a green boutonniere perennial beneath his yellow grin. He took the sparse wint.. | classic-cormac grim-beauty skeletal-remains | Cormac McCarthy | |
| c052e5d | One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike wish harsh breaths and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and brunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide and a gout of foam hung from the long jaw and then gone in a muted hoofclatter, the aging magistrat.. | liquid time | Cormac McCarthy | |
| d948f48 | Ah, they said. Que bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to hear men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted. | friendship generosity | Cormac McCarthy | |
| ca233ea | Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth's crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth's wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with root, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 9d950ac | The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 32bbf09 | When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be, Billy said. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you just wind up tryin to minimize the pain. Anyway this country aint the same. Nor anything in it. The war changed everthing. I dont think people even know it yet. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 57c0781 | He sat by a gray window in the gray light in an abandoned house in the late afternoon and read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint concerns. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| febe718 | The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos. That would be a hell of a zoo. The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 0cd74c3 | Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 781cd35 | If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkenin.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 695d64c | This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 6d39d69 | Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 38289a9 | In what direction did lost men veer? | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 1e795c0 | It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman's right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the important test of the Liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to th.. | David Mamet | ||
| ee65334 | In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery. It is only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enli.. | hippies progressives | David Mamet | |
| 27d3b6d | They were and are children of privilege... the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a "liberal arts education" is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete - to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than h.. | David Mamet | ||
| e0abecb | Well, there are those who would say it's a form of aggression." "What is?" "A surprise." | David Mamet | ||
| a789855 | We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law's treatment. But 'fairness' is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable princi.. | David Mamet | ||
| db6b6d5 | We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole land.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 1e3fbed | What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 2e0be52 | There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick. | land life matter silence | Annie Dillard | |
| 82f1242 | He is careful of what he reads, for this is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, as this is what he will know. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 492dae4 | I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. . . . For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: "The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness." . . . In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensat.. | nature seeing vision | Annie Dillard | |
| 94398e3 | People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. | Annie Dillard | ||
| b59fbee | Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, "an infinite storm of beauty." The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth's face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burs.. | poetry seeing spirituality | Annie Dillard | |
| 45c5c3c | The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin's rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys. | boys connection memoir sexuality | Annie Dillard | |
| 8cc5558 | But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second wa.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| f7f9841 | This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. the afternoon. You can't take it with you. | living-life-to-the-fullest time time-passing | Annie Dillard |