Quote

So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 20
Novelist
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Charles McCarthy
Way
Away
Lesson
World
Might
Lessons
Everything
Necessary
Nothing
Stand
Hard
Least
Dispensed
Thing
Taken
Omitted
Made
Fall
Seams
Every
Tell
Despised

More quotes by Cormac McCarthy

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I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.
Cormac McCarthy
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At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned
Cormac McCarthy
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Just take me with you. Please. I cant. Please, Papa. I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
Cormac McCarthy
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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.
Cormac McCarthy
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He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
Cormac McCarthy
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She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.
Cormac McCarthy
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Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.
Cormac McCarthy
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There is no later. This is later.
Cormac McCarthy
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You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.
Cormac McCarthy
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Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.
Cormac McCarthy
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There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.
Cormac McCarthy
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The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
Cormac McCarthy
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The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here. Yeah. You don't think that's so great. It's okay.
Cormac McCarthy
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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 McCarthy
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For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?
Cormac McCarthy
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She smiled. I think it's just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think. Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then.
Cormac McCarthy
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You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.
Cormac McCarthy
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It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
Cormac McCarthy
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The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.
Cormac McCarthy