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Cormac Mccarthy

Cormac Mccarthy

Novelist · American · b. 1933

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140 quotes

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.
Cormac MccarthyRead
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.
Cormac MccarthyRead
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
Cormac MccarthyRead
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.
Cormac MccarthyRead
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
Cormac MccarthyRead
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Cormac MccarthyRead
He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.
Cormac MccarthyRead
There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.
Cormac MccarthyRead
Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.
Cormac MccarthyRead
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.
Cormac MccarthyRead
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.
Cormac MccarthyRead
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
Cormac MccarthyRead
Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
Cormac MccarthyRead
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and 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.
Cormac MccarthyRead
Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.
Cormac MccarthyRead
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
Cormac MccarthyRead
Maybe it's like Mac says. Ever man winds up with the horse that suits him.
Cormac MccarthyRead
They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.
Cormac MccarthyRead
My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.
Cormac MccarthyRead
The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
Cormac MccarthyRead
You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didnt. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn't 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. I thinkI done the best with itI knew how but itstill wasntmine. It neverhas been.
Cormac MccarthyRead

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