Luke Appignani > Luke's Quotes

“When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“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.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“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.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. 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.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.”
― Charles Bowen

“He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

“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.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Long before morning 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 is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West