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
The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.
It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.
Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.
Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Each the others world entire.
He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.
I didn't mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said. I know you didn't. I just meant I'd seen some things I'd as soon not of. I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back. Yessir.
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.
The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.
Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.
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.
Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned