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"I've been at some pains to tell you about myself because among other reasons I think we should know who our enemies are. I've known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people."
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"Shame lies. All the time. About everything. Don't believe your shame."

"Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other."

"[If a man] postpone[s] any open acknowledgement... that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends [are] based... he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But... they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."

"We are what we believe we are."

"Man is more likely to believe an opinion that he wanted to hear - than a fact that he wishes was an opinion."

"Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled."

"Some people are each envious of the person they used to be."

"No single bad person regards themselves as a bad person."

"You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it."

"To say 'I want to have sex with this person' is to express a desire which is not intellectually directed in the way that 'I want to eradicate poverty in the world' is an intellectually directed desire. Furthernore, the gratification of sexual desire can only ever give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna, the great Indian scholar said: 'When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching."
Explore more quotes by Cormac McCarthy

"A man is always right to pursue the thing he loves.No matter even if it kills him?I think so. Yes. No matter what."

"In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting."

"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."

"Do you think I lie to you?No.But you think I might lie to you about dying.Yes.Okay. I might. But we're not dying.Okay."

"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."

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."

"It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo's clamor."

"Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way."
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