“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?”
No Country for Old Men (2005)
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Cormac McCarthy 270
American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter 1933Related quotes
“How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A Conversation with Professor Norman Finkelstein,” CounterPunch, December 13, 2001 by Don Atapattu
Other sourced statements
after 2010, Isa Genzken, the artist who doesn't do interviews' (2014)
Watts on Wiggles Waves http://wigglesandwaves.blogspot.nl/2004/12/watts-on-wiggles-waves.html, used in the Cosmosis track No Such Thing (2007).
Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love
Context: I had a friend, a companion of my own age, who, when he was twenty, had loved a young girl. He was poor, she was rich. Her family separated them. The girl married some one else and almost immediately afterward she died. My friend lived. Some day you will know for yourself that it is almost as true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing which does not leave its scar. I had been the confidant of his serious passion, and I became the confidant of the various affairs that followed that first ineffaceable disappointment. He felt, he inspired, other loves. He tasted other joys. He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart's depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his words. How many times he has said to me, "In others I have always looked for her and as I have never found her, I have never truly loved any one but her."
As quoted by John M. Kost http://www.mackinac.org/bio.aspx?ID=104 (25 July 1995) in S. 946, the Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1995: hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management and the District of Columbia of the Committee on Governmental Affairs (1996).
This appears to derive from a 1910 advertisement by writer Alfred Henry Lewis for a forthcoming series of biographical articles about Roosevelt: "All activity, Mr. Roosevelt has often shown that it is better to do the wrong thing than do nothing at all. In politics this last is peculiarly true. The best thing is to do the right thing; the next best is to do the wrong thing; the worst thing of all things is to stand perfectly still". (e.g. in La Follette's Magazine https://books.google.com/books?id=RV4CAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA183&dq=%22best+thing%22+%22right+thing%22+%22worst+thing%22+nothing&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNksu-nZrMAhVDy2MKHSl1Df8Q6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=%22the%20best%20thing%20is%20to%20do%20the%20right%20thing%22&f=false (28 May 1910)
Disputed