Quote

Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.

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
Hand
Strung
Upon
Axis
Often
Axes
Hands
Waking
Dream
Forced
Must
Narrative
Life
Along
World
Events
Interchangeable

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It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing.
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You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.
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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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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.
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When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.
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War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
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But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?
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You are either born a writer or you are not.
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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.
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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.
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It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.
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The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.
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I've always been interested in the Southwest. There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.
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Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.
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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.
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When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
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I dont know what I ever done, she said. I truly dont. Chigurh nodded. Probably you do, he said. There's a reason for everything. She shook her head. How many times I've said them very words. I wont again.
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Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
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Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.
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Choose your enemies carefully 'cause they will define you Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends Gonna last with you longer than your friend
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