She said that femininity encoded mandates that were far less forgiving than anything men were familiar with.
The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy. I suppose that’s true. What then? Is that all that the world has in mind? If the world has a mind then it’s all worse than we thought.
Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.
The darker picture is always the correct one. When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore. And yet we imagine that the future will somehow be different. I’ve no idea why we are even still here but in all probability we will not be here much longer.
That’s where you’re wrong my friend. Everything’s important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important. Whether he’s a small town county sheriff or the president. Or a busted out bum. You might even understand that some day.
They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.
The best way to die well is to live well. To die for another would give your death meaning. Ignoring for the time being the fact that the other is going to die anyway.
Bright people often have a good load to carry. But boredom is seldom a part of it. It’s all right. I’m always pleased to see just that small bit deeper. You deny our brotherhood. Insisting as you do in your sly way that our genealogies and our socioeconomic standings have set us apart at birth in a manner not to be contravened. But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.
It may even be that everybody starts out fairly unique only most people get over it. Come.
Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it? What the hell’s wrong with you?
I inherited him from my grandfather. My family had a carnival. He was one of the acts. My grandfather died and the parrot hasnt spoken since. Sort of like my grandfather’s clock.
Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.
The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary.
In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete.
Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the word is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.
What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions.
The whole affair calls up images you’d rather not entertain. Her great hummocky fundament wobbling away down the street like a sack of cats headed for the river.
He watched her until she was lost among the tourists. Men and women alike turning to look after her. He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Don’t close your eyes.
What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there.
It was defeat. It was being beaten. More bitter to him than death. You need to get over that, he said.