Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” Quotes (60 Quotes)

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.

They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.

Your forget what you want to remember and remember what you want to forget

If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

Your kinda weirded out, ain't ya?

If you break little promises, you'll break big ones.

That the boy was all that stood between him and death.

Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly behind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of childhood. This is the day to shape the days upon.

In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.

The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall

What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.

In the grueling light that passed for day...

The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be.

What you put in your head is there forever.

In the night's in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.

The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.

When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.

It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.

The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.

The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

Where men can't live gods fare no better.

He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.

He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

There is no God and we are his prophets.

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

There is no later. This is later.

You have my whole heart. You always did.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.