Cormac McCarthy Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

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
I don't know what I ever done, she said. I truly don't. Chigurh nodded. Probably you do, he said. There's a reason for everything. She shook her head. How many times I've said them very words. I won't again.

Cormac McCarthy
Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. (All the Pretty Horses)

Cormac McCarthy
And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? 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. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.

Cormac McCarthy
The old man … said … the notion that men can be understood was probably an illusion.

Cormac McCarthy
How many is there, John?.
Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?

Cormac McCarthy
I'll tell you something, Sheriff. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got something that means the world to you it's all that more likely it'll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter. I think about that.

Cormac McCarthy
I never knowed there was such a place as this.
I guess there's probably every kind of place you can think of.

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
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
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
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
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