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Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.

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
Blind
Least
Enemy
Fear
Often
Make
Hazards
Men
Shape
World
Shapes

More quotes by Cormac McCarthy

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The truth may often be carried about by those who themselves remain all unaware of it. They bear that which has weight and substance and yet for them has no name whereby it may be evoked or called forth. They go about ignorant of the true nature of their condition, such are the wiles of truth and such its stratagems.
Cormac McCarthy
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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
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My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you.
Cormac McCarthy
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You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.
Cormac McCarthy
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The point is there ain't no point.
Cormac McCarthy
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How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
Cormac McCarthy
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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.
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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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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When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
Cormac McCarthy
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Any time you're throwin dirt you're losin ground.
Cormac McCarthy
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You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.
Cormac McCarthy
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... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.
Cormac McCarthy
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He didn't say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don't remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time.
Cormac McCarthy
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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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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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In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.
Cormac McCarthy
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For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?
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