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"Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?"
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"It's strange. How hollow i feel. Like there might be echoes inside of me. Like I'm one of those chocolate rabbits they used to sell around Easter, the ones that were nothing more than a sweet shell encapsulating a world of nothing. I'm like that. I encapsulate a world of nothing."

"As to the roaming of sages,They move in utter emptiness,Let their minds meander in the great nothingness;They run beyond conventionAnd go through where there is no gateway.They listen to the soundlessAnd look at the formless,They are not constrained by societyAnd not bound to its customs."

"There are 200,000 species of fly alone. So the void, the emptiness, must be in you."

"There's just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise."

"Plenty of foods inside my stomach.Soul is empty."

"Recalibration comes from experiencing Nothingness, being open to emptiness as the ultimate reality and our nature. It is the purest mind, the Energy-Consciousness itself."

"No, I don't think I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved, either. There's nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing thay isn't fake is that gooshy thing inside me."

"If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I 'poured' the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too 'poor' to be able to 'pour' back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness."
Explore more quotes by Cormac McCarthy

"All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes."

"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

"The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed."

"The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit."

"This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea."

"This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be."

"A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone."

"I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily."
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