Cormac McCarthy Quotes (191 Quotes)

The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he'd been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.

For this will to deceive that is in thing luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

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.

There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.

You have my whole heart. You always did. You're the best guy. You always were.

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

If fate is the law, then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It's in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

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.

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

If I didnt have her I dont know what I would have. Well, yes I do. You wouldnt need a box to put it in, neither.

This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.

He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all.

You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all.

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.

The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein convinced that it's all that good a thing.

He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.

He sat by a gray window in the gray light in an abandoned house in the late afternoon and read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint concerns.

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.

You'd think a man that had waited eighty some odd years on God to come into his life, well, you'd think he'd come. If he didnt you'd still have to figure that he knew what he was doin. I don't know what other description of God you could have. So what you end up with is that those he has spoke to are the ones that must of needed it the worst. That's not a easy thing to accept.

He looked into those blue eyes like a man seeking some vision of the increate future of the universe.

I'm double bred for death by fire.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.

The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end.

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?

What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?

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

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.

In history there are no control groups.

There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

I was afraid I was going to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.