Cormac McCarthy Quotes (191 Quotes)

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.

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around.

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

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?

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.

In the spaniards heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love for truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

If a man's at odds to know his own mind it's because he hasn't got aught but his mind to know it with.

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

If you dont respect me what must you think of yourself?

Who knows what worse luck your bad luck has save you from.

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.

He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to holo

It just bothered me that you might think I'm somethin special. I aint.

They had no curiousity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.

If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers.

But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?

It is community and respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed.

You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.

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.

Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.

All courage is a form of constancy. It is always himself that a coward abandons first. After this all other betrayals come.

I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.

I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.