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Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes

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Famous Cormac McCarthy Quotes

“Sometimes in the winter in the dark I'd wake and everything that smacked of dread would have lifted up and stolen away in the night and I would just be lying there with the snow blowing against the glass. I'd think that maybe I should turn on the lamp but then I'd just lie there and listen to the quiet. The wind in the quiet. There are times now when I see those patients in their soiled nightshirts lying on gurneys in the hallway with their faces to the wall that I ask myself what humanity means. I would ask does it include me.”

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Book:Stella Maris
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“He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”

MenSoulLightPastStarsBlackDarkKnowingSeaRocksHorseTownsDown AndMovedRosePassingPassingsShipsGrassSaltDrowningWhalesPassing ThroughSeamlessFerryColts
Author:Cormac McCarthy
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“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.”

NightSoundHurtDarkTreeWindArmsListeningColdBalanceEarsRoseGet UpCalculationsSkullsBlacknessAutisticReckoningWind In The Trees
Book:The Road
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“From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.”

FeelsHandsRememberStuffSidesDarkStageListeningColdSummerGoldDressesTheatreTallWakingScentLapFoldsFreezeDaydreamingStockingsRemembers EverythingDrapes
Book:The Road
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“What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.”

FirstsBelieveSaidSoulLastsSufferingNamesI BelieveDarkMy OwnOne ThingStonesVanitySpokesBitternessVoidRepentOblivionNot AloneMonstrousSlanderAlone In The Dark
Author:Cormac McCarthy
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“and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.”

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Book:The Border Trilogy
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“They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and 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 in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”

WorldLightEarthYoungNightStarsDarkHeardFiguresColdThousandTenRoundsBellsThievesElectricBoresGlowingOrchardAll The Pretty Horses
Book:All the Pretty Horses
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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 that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of Him.”

KnowsMenBelieveHelpingTurnsEasyDarkViewsExistenceImagineTerribleSorrowBelieve In GodClothingsTerrible ThingsUnspeakable
Book:The Border Trilogy
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“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”

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Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.”

WorldLongStarsDarkSleepDarknessSeaListeningMountainLong TimeBlueLaysBreathingDawnRisingDiamondHeelsBlanketSignaturesWildnessRising UpOrion
Book:All the Pretty Horses
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“By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.”

IfsWorldWayEyeFacesBlackDarkSkyFrontsWindStormEveningSmokeIronGrayLightningSparesFlawedTerrainSweatingSaddlesWelding
Book:The Border Trilogy: Picador Classic
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“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.”

NightBlackDarkSawsHeardMountainShadowHorseSilentLeavingStormPassingPassingsDustChainsRacingLightningMoonlightSpineStainsFlutteringHorse RacingWild Horses
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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