Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
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If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?
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...death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape.
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You are the oveja negre, no? The black sheep?
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I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.
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I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.
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The hour that followed was a long hour.
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Whatever exists, he the judge said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
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...and he is as eitherhanded as a spider,...
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I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
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...hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy.
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How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.
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I don't aim to quit while I'm ahead. I just aim to quit.
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Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them
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A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.
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Where is yesterday? … And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?
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When they went down to the bunkhouse for dinner the vaqueros seemed to treat them with a certain deference but whether it was the deference accorded the accomplished or that accorded to mental defectives they were unsure.
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What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death.
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Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.
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Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.
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I’ll tell you somethin, Sheriff. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter. I think about that
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Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case.
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I didnt know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal.
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If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.