If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?
Interpretation
The quote questions whether people would choose their lives if they were fully aware of their circumstances and experiences.
Cormac McCarthy's quote suggests that if individuals had complete knowledge of their life story, including the struggles and hardships they would face, many might reconsider their choices. It highlights the complexities of life and the idea that ignorance can sometimes be a source of comfort, implying that the burden of knowledge is heavy and might deter people from pursuing their current paths.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing one's journey.
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Before I latched onto the concept of stereotypes, not once did I reckon with the fact that I would never be a 'Hollywood starlet.'
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
The media's power is frail. Without the people's support, it can be shut off with the ease of turning a light switch.
Demand that your government pays more attention. It's immoral that people in Africa die like flies of diseases that no one dies of in the United States. And the more disease there is, the more political unrest there will be, leading to more Darfurs, which the U.S. will have to pay to fix.
No one likes to admit they are racist or bear prejudices. Nor do they even like to be open and honest when they witness racist behaviour.
It is only when human beings see themselves simply as human beings, no longer as gods, that they are in a position to perceive the wholly other nature of God.
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