Cormac McCarthy Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy.

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

Cormac McCarthy
It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. — The judge

Cormac McCarthy
There ain't but one truth, said John Grady. The truth is what happened. It ain't what come out of somebody's mouth.

Cormac McCarthy
It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, don't it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you ain't lived yet, too.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.

Cormac McCarthy
He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.

Cormac McCarthy
In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

Cormac McCarthy
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women.

Cormac McCarthy
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.

Cormac McCarthy
One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

Cormac McCarthy
They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I'll hug his neck.

Cormac McCarthy
The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less.

Cormac McCarthy
There's a difference between quittin and knowin when you're beat.

Cormac McCarthy
People think they know what they want but they generally don't. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways.

Cormac McCarthy
Our enemies... seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

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

Cormac McCarthy
Where is yesterday? … And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?

Cormac McCarthy
You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There ain't no such thing as a bargain promise.

Cormac McCarthy
He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realised that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.

Cormac McCarthy
My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.

Cormac McCarthy
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. You're asking that I second say the world.

Cormac McCarthy