Cormac McCarthy Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Cormac McCarthy
God don't lie.... And these are his words.... He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

Cormac McCarthy
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.

Cormac McCarthy
Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

Cormac McCarthy
She came from the shower wrapped in a towel and she sat on the bed and took his hand and looked down at him. I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot. He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.

Cormac McCarthy
When you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon something that you may very well not be equal to and I think that this is one of them things. When you've said that it's real and not just in your head I'm not all that sure what it is you have said.

Cormac McCarthy
The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him. The smell of coalsmoke in the air at night. Old times, dead years. For him such memories are bitter ones.

Cormac McCarthy
... hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy.

Cormac McCarthy
Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian.

Cormac McCarthy
They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

Cormac McCarthy
They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.

Cormac McCarthy
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.

Cormac McCarthy
When he looked back at the primadonna she was watching them through the spyglasses. As if she might better assess them in that way where they set forth upon the shadowbanded road, the coming twilight. Inhabiting only that ocular ground in which the country appeared out of nothing and vanished again into nothing, tree and rock and the darkening mountains beyond, all of it contained and itself containing only what was needed and nothing more.

Cormac McCarthy
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Cormac McCarthy
You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said, I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.

Cormac McCarthy
This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

Cormac McCarthy
... ingratitude is more common than you might think.

Cormac McCarthy
... he shook his head at the wonderful invention of folly in its guises and forms.

Cormac McCarthy
Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark's total restitution could appease.

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

Cormac McCarthy
It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

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

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
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