Stella Maris Quotes

“If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be?
It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

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

“If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“I think our time is up. I know. Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Nobody comes with names. You give them names so that you can find them in the dark.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules . . . The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“I would like to belong but I dont.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“I'm not really concerned about what other people believe. I dont consider them qualified to have an opinion.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“At what age in a child’s life does rage become sorrow?”
― 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

“Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black Suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“I gave up apologizing for myself a long time ago. What should I say? That I’m sorry to be that which I am? I’d very little to do with it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war. Yes. Well, it’s probably like any bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be. The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Because I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasnt going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“People are interested in other people. But your unconscious is not. Or only as they might directly affect you. It’s been hired to do a very specific job. It never sleeps. It’s more faithful than God.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Women enjoy a different history of madness. From witchcraft to hysteria we're just bad news. We know that women were condemned as witches because they were mentally unstable but no one has considered the numbers - even few as they might be - of women who were stoned to death for being bright. That I havent wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake is not a testament to our ascending civility but to our ascending skepticism. If we still believed in witches we'd still be burning them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Your life is set upon you like a dog.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“It has to do with intelligence. Yes. And again, when you’re talking about intelligence you’re talking about number. A claim that the mathless are quick to frown upon. It’s about calculation and the nature of calculation. Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you dont understand numbers you wont even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial—or not—depending on their nature. Of course one might also add that intelligence is a basic component of evil. The more stupid you are the less capable you are of doing harm. Except perhaps in a clumsy and inadvertent manner. The word cretin comes from the French chrétien. Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams. Your unconscious will keep trying to wake you. In every sense. Imperilment is bottomless. As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“If psychosis was was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“You dont know what antipsychotics are and you dont know how they work. Or why. All we have finally is the spectacle of tardive dyskinetics feeling their way along the wall. Jerking and drooling and muttering. Of course for those trekking toward the void there are waystations where the news will very suddenly become altogether bleaker. Maybe a sudden chill. There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what’s down there if you havent been down there.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“I no longer have an opinion about reality. I used to. Now I dont. The first rule of the world is that everything vanishes forever. To the extent that you refuse to accept that then you are living in a fantasy.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris