Carolina QuotesThere's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.
Cormac McCarthy Carolinian
Source
The New York Times, April 19, 1992, "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" by Richard B. Woodward
- year
- 1992
Cite this record
“There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the…” Cormac McCarthy. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-C2271A8005. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/c2271a8005
More from Cormac McCarthy
It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong. (p.71)
The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.
The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again.