"Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."
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Quote collection
Cormac McCarthy quotes (page 2 of 18)
357 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate."
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"I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have."
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"Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it."
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"The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it."
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"I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it."
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"in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace."
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"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am."
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"Our enemies ... seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him."
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"They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey."
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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."
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"Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from."
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"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else."
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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."
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"It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal."
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"The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow."
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"If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around."
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"Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love."
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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."
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"The trouble with a liar is he can't remember what he said."
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