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All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy

Top 10 Best Quotes

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

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”

“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.”

“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”

“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.”

“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

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Book Keywords:

reality, growing-up, women, loss-of-innocence, truthfulness, beauty, past, time, betrayals, healing, intelligence, pain, innocence, honor, living, cowardice, youth, history, life, constancy, scars, memory, sorrow, truths, grief, steadfastness, experience, men, forgiveness, courage, injuries

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