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No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

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
Pain
Grief
Done
Hour
Heart
Later
Things
Birth
Provenance
Grace
Providential
Beauty
Ashes
Hours
Holds
Common
Lists

More quotes by 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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Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.
Cormac McCarthy
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What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
Cormac McCarthy
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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.
Cormac McCarthy
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Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he's made of it. You tell me that I want God's love? I don't. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there's no-one to ask it of. And there's no going back, there's no setting things right, there's only the hope of nothingness.
Cormac McCarthy
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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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Ah me, thou Destiny, Giver of evil gifts.
Cormac McCarthy
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This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.
Cormac McCarthy
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Ever step you take is forever.
Cormac McCarthy
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When the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be their yet.
Cormac McCarthy
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If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.
Cormac McCarthy
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If only my heart were stone.
Cormac McCarthy
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I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.
Cormac McCarthy
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If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.
Cormac McCarthy
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The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.
Cormac McCarthy
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Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
Cormac McCarthy
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There is no God and we are his prophets.
Cormac McCarthy
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Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.
Cormac McCarthy
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The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.
Cormac McCarthy