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Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch.

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
Book
Kind
Itch
Scratch
Scratches
Usually
Quite
Comes

More quotes by Cormac McCarthy

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What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?
Cormac McCarthy
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You are either born a writer or you are not.
Cormac McCarthy
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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
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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Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.
Cormac McCarthy
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I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.
Cormac McCarthy
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You have my whole heart. You always did.
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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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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How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
Cormac McCarthy
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If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.
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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I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.
Cormac McCarthy
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The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.
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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By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
Cormac McCarthy
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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
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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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There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.
Cormac McCarthy