Noooo 😭 Was easily one of my favorite contemporary authors.
citybornvillager on
May he rest peacefully now.
Blood Meridian is a very important book to me.
RightingTheShip on
I’m glad he got his final novel(s) out last year. One more to say goodbye.
yeahmaybe on
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
SimianGrifter on
Child of God is an underrated masterpiece. Fight me.
reddicted on
I hope someone writes his obit without any punctuation.
RoseArcanum on
Terrible way to begin my day. The world has lost another brilliant mind
Qoo6688 on
I recently started reading a lot of his works. I have finished The Road and All the Pretty Horses. Currently, reading The Crossing. I really enjoy his work. I don’t think there’s any one out there at his level. RIP.
booksnbiceps on
Just finished listening to blood meridian. The narrator on audible does such an incredible job.
Rip to you sir.
Uptons_BJs on
Cormac McCarthy is perhaps the greatest story for “never giving up”:
​
His first book was published in 1965, and he kept writing, but he was not successful commercially at all. Before 1992, none of McCarthy’s novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies.
​
It took until 1992 for him to actually write a commercially successful book, All the Pretty Horses. He became famous, and retroactively all the stuff he wrote before 1992 started selling well.
VermouthandVitriol on
Twitter (for once) was really great today, everyone posting their favourite paragraphs from so many of his books. They’re all so brilliant. The comment I resonated with most was someone said it takes so long to read a Cormac book because almost every page you need to pause and stare out the window for five minutes.
tjmora on
RIP. The Road is the only novel of his that I read but I gotta say his prose is really something else. I’m no native English speaker but when I read his novel his prose really stands out. It’s like there’s a melody to how he wrote. I’ve only read The Road because I mostly read science fiction and The Road is a post apocalyptic epic that’s close enough to sci-fi.
cash_bone_ on
The chapter in Blood Meridian where they find the mad horse that’s been bitten by a rattlesnake has stuck with me more than any other piece of literature i’ve ever read, R.I.P. to one of the true great titans of the written word
xcj7 on
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
RIP to one of the best.
EspeonMain on
Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men were two of my fave books…
I’ll read The Road!
RIP, he was an amazing writer…
TallUncle on
My favorite line from *Blood Meridian* (and also Reddit’s?):
“Anything in Creation that exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent” – Judge Holden
The entire character can be summarized into that one line.
ShroomBooty on
His work is filled with poetry that sounds like it was written by a god or someone who saw God and had to come back.
whiteskwirl2 on
>They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
–*All the Pretty Horses*
itsakpatil on
“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Was reading Suttree right now and heard the news, RIP.
crumbbelly on
Reading about McCarthy’s passing reminded me of a part of myself I’d somehow forgotten. I’d read all of his work through my youth, and his perspectives aligned with all those things I felt made us human; he was my favorite author, and his creative influence captivated me more than I can give credit.
I reminisced about his work this morning and grabbed a dusty book off the shelf; I’d highlighted some prose that had touched me a lifetime ago; in doing so, I glimpsed at myself through time – as I had been, and as I remain.
“That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.”
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
I hope he dreamt of horses as he passed; I hope those images are the things he held onto, and I hope those are the things I am able to keep as the years tear me apart.
Orfeaus on
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
CannolisRUs on
The other day I was at the thrift store and picked up All the Pretty Horses for 10 cents and had the pleasure of schooling an old man on McCarthys works when he scoffed at the book title. I heard this one was a little lighter than his other classics, and to be honest I’m excited for something a little less heavy
willreadforbooks on
I’d just like to recommend a Mississippi author (not that one) named Michael Farris Smith to anyone that enjoys Cormaac McCarthy. Very well written, bleak, haunting novels. I’ve only read a few because I need years to recover in between reading them.
[deleted] on
“They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland.
The leather cracked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into
a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high
prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed
around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that
tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and
they rode out on the round dais of earth which alone was dark and no
light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the
swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they
rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that
dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely
jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”
TopMaintenance8516 on
You told me once you believed in God.
The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I’d just tell him. I’d say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know. And he’ll say: What’s that? And then I’m goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.
[deleted] on
People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I dont recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.
throwawaycatallus on
“The United States, for two centuries now, has been obsessed with God and with guns, and neither fascination is likely to wane… The relevance of Cormac McCarthy is absolute; he is the Homer of our tragic epic of slaughter and religiosity. Judge Holden, as he promised, will never die, and right now the Judge is dancing and fiddling somewhere out there in the Western night.” Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, p274
throwawaycatallus on
“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
“Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
30 Comments
Noooo 😭 Was easily one of my favorite contemporary authors.
May he rest peacefully now.
Blood Meridian is a very important book to me.
I’m glad he got his final novel(s) out last year. One more to say goodbye.
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
Child of God is an underrated masterpiece. Fight me.
I hope someone writes his obit without any punctuation.
Terrible way to begin my day. The world has lost another brilliant mind
I recently started reading a lot of his works. I have finished The Road and All the Pretty Horses. Currently, reading The Crossing. I really enjoy his work. I don’t think there’s any one out there at his level. RIP.
Just finished listening to blood meridian. The narrator on audible does such an incredible job.
Rip to you sir.
Cormac McCarthy is perhaps the greatest story for “never giving up”:
​
His first book was published in 1965, and he kept writing, but he was not successful commercially at all. Before 1992, none of McCarthy’s novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies.
​
It took until 1992 for him to actually write a commercially successful book, All the Pretty Horses. He became famous, and retroactively all the stuff he wrote before 1992 started selling well.
Twitter (for once) was really great today, everyone posting their favourite paragraphs from so many of his books. They’re all so brilliant. The comment I resonated with most was someone said it takes so long to read a Cormac book because almost every page you need to pause and stare out the window for five minutes.
RIP. The Road is the only novel of his that I read but I gotta say his prose is really something else. I’m no native English speaker but when I read his novel his prose really stands out. It’s like there’s a melody to how he wrote. I’ve only read The Road because I mostly read science fiction and The Road is a post apocalyptic epic that’s close enough to sci-fi.
The chapter in Blood Meridian where they find the mad horse that’s been bitten by a rattlesnake has stuck with me more than any other piece of literature i’ve ever read, R.I.P. to one of the true great titans of the written word
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
RIP to one of the best.
Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men were two of my fave books…
I’ll read The Road!
RIP, he was an amazing writer…
My favorite line from *Blood Meridian* (and also Reddit’s?):
“Anything in Creation that exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent” – Judge Holden
The entire character can be summarized into that one line.
His work is filled with poetry that sounds like it was written by a god or someone who saw God and had to come back.
>They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
–*All the Pretty Horses*
“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Was reading Suttree right now and heard the news, RIP.
Reading about McCarthy’s passing reminded me of a part of myself I’d somehow forgotten. I’d read all of his work through my youth, and his perspectives aligned with all those things I felt made us human; he was my favorite author, and his creative influence captivated me more than I can give credit.
I reminisced about his work this morning and grabbed a dusty book off the shelf; I’d highlighted some prose that had touched me a lifetime ago; in doing so, I glimpsed at myself through time – as I had been, and as I remain.
“That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.”
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
I hope he dreamt of horses as he passed; I hope those images are the things he held onto, and I hope those are the things I am able to keep as the years tear me apart.
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
The other day I was at the thrift store and picked up All the Pretty Horses for 10 cents and had the pleasure of schooling an old man on McCarthys works when he scoffed at the book title. I heard this one was a little lighter than his other classics, and to be honest I’m excited for something a little less heavy
I’d just like to recommend a Mississippi author (not that one) named Michael Farris Smith to anyone that enjoys Cormaac McCarthy. Very well written, bleak, haunting novels. I’ve only read a few because I need years to recover in between reading them.
“They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland.
The leather cracked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into
a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high
prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed
around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that
tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and
they rode out on the round dais of earth which alone was dark and no
light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the
swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they
rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that
dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely
jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”
You told me once you believed in God.
The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I’d just tell him. I’d say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know. And he’ll say: What’s that? And then I’m goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.
People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I dont recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.
“The United States, for two centuries now, has been obsessed with God and with guns, and neither fascination is likely to wane… The relevance of Cormac McCarthy is absolute; he is the Homer of our tragic epic of slaughter and religiosity. Judge Holden, as he promised, will never die, and right now the Judge is dancing and fiddling somewhere out there in the Western night.” Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, p274
“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
“Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
He made human depravity sound so beautiful
“Fallen on hard times ain’t ya son?”
“I just ain’t fell on no good ones”