"If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?"
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Quote collection
Cormac McCarthy quotes (page 9 of 18)
357 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable."
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"Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen."
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"It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight."
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"They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless."
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"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."
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"If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what."
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"In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell."
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"The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning."
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"Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now"
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"Teaching writing is a hustle."
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"They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea."
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"When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too."
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"What joins men together ... is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies."
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"There's a difference between quittin and knowin when you're beat."
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"If only my heart were stone."
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"It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift."
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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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"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless."
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"Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new."
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