He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all. Cormac McCarthy More Quotes by Cormac McCarthy More Quotes From Cormac McCarthy It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood. Cormac McCarthy knowing believe blood I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen. Cormac McCarthy citizens respectable house 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 eye sea dark See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Cormac McCarthy shirts fire children He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits. Cormac McCarthy pain soul might When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different. Cormac McCarthy different fire hair Men of God and men of war have strange affinities. Cormac McCarthy strange men war Suttree surfaced from these fevered deeps to hear a maudlin voice chant latin by his bedside, what medieval ghost come to usurp his fallen corporeality. An oiled thumball redolent of lime and sage pondered his shuttered lids.Miserere mei, Deus ...His ears anointed, his lips ... omnis maligna discordia ... Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria. Japheth when you left your father's house the birds had flown. You were not prepared for such weathers. You'd spoke too lightly of the winter in your father's heart. We saw you in the streets. Sad. Cormac McCarthy latin heart father Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. Cormac McCarthy book lying years 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 patterns events shapes In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun. Cormac McCarthy song bird night Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun. Cormac McCarthy light morning long I got here the same way the coin did. Cormac McCarthy coins way The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you. Cormac McCarthy tragedy writing ideas Do you have any notion of how goddamned crazy you are? Cormac McCarthy notion crazy 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 light eye moving The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand. Cormac McCarthy hands past world Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life. Cormac McCarthy destiny choices men 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 men war thinking 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 naps children thinking
