Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthyis an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses, he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 July 1933
CityProvidence, RI
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?
When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.
Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.
Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.
Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.
Dying ain't in people's plans, is it?
What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?
There was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.