Cormac McCarthy Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong.

Cormac McCarthy
He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

Cormac McCarthy
Jackson, pistols drawn, lurched into the street vowing to shoot the ass off Jesus Christ, the longlegged white son of a bitch.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching shape in the glass of the depot door. His fetch come up from life's other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand.

Cormac McCarthy
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

Cormac McCarthy
If it ain't a mess, it'll do till the mess gets here.

Cormac McCarthy
Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.

Cormac McCarthy
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.

Cormac McCarthy
He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?

Cormac McCarthy
People say that the coyote is a witch. Often the witch is a coyote.

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

Cormac McCarthy
Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee. — The judge

Cormac McCarthy
... words were said that could not be put right again...

Cormac McCarthy
He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

Cormac McCarthy
Nothing wounded goes uphill, he said. It just don't happen.

Cormac McCarthy
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Cormac McCarthy
Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.

Cormac McCarthy
Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

Cormac McCarthy
It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood, and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.

Cormac McCarthy
Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.

Cormac McCarthy
What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

Cormac McCarthy
By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
I don't aim to quit while I'm ahead. I just aim to quit.

Cormac McCarthy
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.

Cormac McCarthy
Just take me with you. Please. I can't. Please, Papa. I can't. I can't hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I can't.

Cormac McCarthy
For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?

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

Cormac McCarthy
Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.

Cormac McCarthy