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If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

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
Followed
Brought
Rule
Use

More quotes by 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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And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
Cormac McCarthy
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All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.
Cormac McCarthy
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If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.
Cormac McCarthy
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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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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 is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.
Cormac McCarthy
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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.
Cormac McCarthy
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He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.
Cormac McCarthy
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Dying ain't in people's plans, is it?
Cormac McCarthy
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On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.
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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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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No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It's never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?
Cormac McCarthy
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He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.
Cormac McCarthy
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I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.
Cormac McCarthy
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He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.
Cormac McCarthy
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He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
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