{"author":"Cormac McCarthy","author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy","total_quotes":229,"quotes":[{"text":"For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the selfsame tale and contain as well all within them. 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.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["lessons","life","stories","world"],"id":991,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way., Nov. 20, 2009].","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["hip","creation","creative-process","driving-forces","hardship","pain","writing"],"id":2178,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["descriptive","literature"],"id":11549,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["existence","hangovers"],"id":12947,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["money"],"id":12981,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"In that cold autistic dark.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["life","life-and-death"],"id":15727,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"All other trades are contained in that of war.Is that why war endures?No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.That's your notion.The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["249","games","war"],"id":17265,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["alienation","atavism","race"],"id":20380,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. 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. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . In whatever . . . Place by whatever . . . Name or by no name at all . . . All tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["ecology","imagination","story","tale","world"],"id":20723,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"},{"text":"He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.","author":"Cormac McCarthy","tags":["life","loss","parenting"],"id":23917,"author_id":"Cormac+McCarthy"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":229,"pages":23,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}