Cormac McCarthy

Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it?

The stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. 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. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talkin about. I've heard it compared to the rock — maybe in the bible—and I wouldnt disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.

Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen.

You shouldn't worry about what people think of you because they don't do it that often.

As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared.

He climbed into the loft and sat at the tower window wrapped in his blanket. Spits of rain on the sill. Summer lightning far out to sea. Like the flare of distant fieldpieces. The patter on the tarp he’d stretched over his bed. He turned up the wick of the lamp at his elbow and took the notebook from its box and opened it. Then he stopped. He sat for a long time. 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. The ages of men stretching grave to grave. An accounting on a slate. Blood, darkness. The washing of dead children on a board. The stone laminations of the world with their fossil prints unreckonable in form and number. My father’s latterday petroglyphs and the people upon the road naked and howling. The storm passed and the dark sea lay cold and heavy. In the cool metallic waters the hammered shapes of great fishes. The reflection in the swells of a molten bolide trundling across the firmament like a burning train. He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp. The straw roof hissing in the bellshaped dark above him and his shadow on the roughtroweled wall. Like those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods.

How do you know you shouldnt? The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonderwhy the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good

The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.

If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose.

When Wittgenstein convinced Russell that all math is a tautology, Russell gave up on math.

Your life is set upon you like a dog.