“Ah, they said. Qué bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to hear men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.”
Cormac McCarthy“Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road“You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.”
Cormac McCarthy, Sanas Chormaic: Cormac's Glossary“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“I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.”
Cormac McCarthy“But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way o show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet is all we have.”
Cormac McCarthy“I think 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“He watched him stoke the flames, God's own firedrake. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.”
Cormac McCarthy“They camped that night on the foreplain at the foot of a talus slope and the murder that had been reckoned upon took place.”
Cormac McCarthy“He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”
Cormac McCarthy“This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.”
Cormac McCarthy