Cormac McCarthy Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.

Cormac McCarthy
The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.

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

Cormac McCarthy
The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time 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
It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

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

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

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

Cormac McCarthy
Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

Cormac McCarthy
Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

Cormac McCarthy
So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

Cormac McCarthy
This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.

Cormac McCarthy
By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.

Cormac McCarthy
The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here. Yeah. You don't think that's so great. It's okay.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy