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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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Cormac McCarthy
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 20
Novelist
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Charles McCarthy
Groups
Control
History
Tell
Might
Never
Weep
More quotes by Cormac McCarthy
What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
Cormac McCarthy
Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.
Cormac McCarthy
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
Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.
Cormac McCarthy
It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.
Cormac McCarthy
Hell ain't half full.
Cormac McCarthy
There is no God and we are his prophets.
Cormac McCarthy
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
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
What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?
Cormac McCarthy
To have a child when you're older, it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things, you know, afresh. It forces the world on you. And I think it's a good thing.
Cormac McCarthy
I guess if everybody went crazy together nobody would notice.
Cormac McCarthy
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
You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.
Cormac McCarthy
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
People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.
Cormac McCarthy
When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?
Cormac McCarthy
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.
Cormac McCarthy
You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.
Cormac McCarthy
How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.
Cormac McCarthy
