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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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Cormac McCarthy
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 20
Novelist
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Charles McCarthy
Atheist
Atheism
Mystery
Told
Desire
Heart

More quotes by Cormac McCarthy

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Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.
Cormac McCarthy
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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
Cormac McCarthy
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Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.
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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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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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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There is no greater monster than reason.
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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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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Dying ain't in people's plans, is it?
Cormac McCarthy
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There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.
Cormac McCarthy
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The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.
Cormac McCarthy
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How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
Cormac McCarthy
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It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing.
Cormac McCarthy
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It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.
Cormac McCarthy
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The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.
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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He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him.
Cormac McCarthy
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What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?
Cormac McCarthy