Matt Clapper > Matt's Quotes

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”
― E.E. Cummings, Selected Poems

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“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

“I was afraid I was going to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“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

“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”
― jonathan safran foer

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― 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

“You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“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

“What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.”
― 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

“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

“You have to carry the fire."
I don't know how to."
Yes, you do."
Is the fire real? The fire?"
Yes it is."
Where is it? I don't know where it is."
Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I will do what I promised." He whispered. "No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“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

“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
― 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

“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree