Cormac McCarthy Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.

Cormac McCarthy
He (Wells) closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.

Cormac McCarthy
Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls.

Cormac McCarthy
This is a terrible place to die in.
Where's a good one?

Cormac McCarthy
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.

Cormac McCarthy
It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.

Cormac McCarthy
I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.

Cormac McCarthy
It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

Cormac McCarthy
Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy.

Cormac McCarthy
You can't be all Mexican. It's like being all mongrel.

Cormac McCarthy
Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream

Cormac McCarthy
The priest looked at him. Do I know you? he said.
Suttree placed one hand on the pew in front of him. An old woman was going along the altar rail with a dusting rag. He struggled to his feet. No, he said. You don't know me.
The priest stepped back, inspecting his clothes, his fishstained shoes.
I just fell asleep a minute. I was resting.
The priest gave a little smile, lightly touched with censure, remonstrance gentled. God's house is not exactly the place to take a nap, he said.
It's not God's house.
I beg your pardon?
It's not God's house.
Oh?
Suttree waved his hand vaguely and stepped past the priest and went down the aisle. The priest watched him. He smiled sadly, but a smile for that.

Cormac McCarthy
The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again.

Cormac McCarthy
How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

Cormac McCarthy
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.

Cormac McCarthy
You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothing else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don't know what all. Start over. And then one morning you wake up and look at the ceiling and guess who's laying there?

Cormac McCarthy
Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole.

Cormac McCarthy
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Cormac McCarthy
Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as in this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.

Cormac McCarthy
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

Cormac McCarthy
I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

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

Cormac McCarthy
Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge

Cormac McCarthy
Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didn't change.

Cormac McCarthy
You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.

Cormac McCarthy
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.

Cormac McCarthy
He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.

Cormac McCarthy
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