Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. Cormac McCarthy More Quotes by Cormac McCarthy More Quotes From Cormac McCarthy The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. Cormac McCarthy drawing color reality The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous. Cormac McCarthy giving-up soul ideas 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 taken simple heart He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing. Cormac McCarthy sat littles long For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it? Cormac McCarthy should should-have said When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. Cormac McCarthy running men years 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 would-be world thinking 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 eye forever country Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now Cormac McCarthy doomed enterprise forever The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. Cormac McCarthy medicine fields dream A dream inside a dream might not be a dream. Cormac McCarthy dream might Each the others world entire. Cormac McCarthy world In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship. Cormac McCarthy rocks eye men Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle. Cormac McCarthy covenant judgment men He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is. Cormac McCarthy give-me lovers giving We're carrying the fire. Cormac McCarthy fire What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream Cormac McCarthy darkness dream children The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries. Cormac McCarthy earth mother wind He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus. Cormac McCarthy space blood fall In every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die. Cormac McCarthy vigor men war
