isabel > isabel's Quotes

“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Mercy is in the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“What the Squire has never understood is that forgiveness has a time limit. While it’s never too late for revenge.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I suppose it should be a comfort to understand that one cannot be dead forever where there’s no forever to be dead in.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“It must surely be true that there is no such collective domain of joy as there is of sorrow. You cant be sure that another man's happiness resembles your own. But where the collective of pain is concerned there can be little doubt at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“When I was younger, I think some glib or cavalier part of me always believed that there was no such thing as heartache - that it was simply a case of things getting in past the ribcage and finding there was no way out. I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, in so far as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“It’s just that sometimes I think I would have found my life pretty funny if I hadnt had to live it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“History is a collection of paper. A few fading recollections. After a while what is not written never happened.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I feel old, Squire. Every conversation is about the past.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“She asked the girl what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said dead.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagined.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“you shouldnt worry about what people think of you because they dont do it that often.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you’ve got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a reason.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You might say that is “too young” to die. But what is too young for a life?”
― Mitch Albom, The Next Person You Meet in Heaven

“When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger