Cormac McCarthy - God Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Black: Belief ain't like unbelief. If you a believer then you got to come finally to a well of belief itself and then you don't have to look no further. There ain't no further. But the unbeliever has got a problem. He has set out to unravel the world, but everything he can point to that ain't true leaves two new things laying there. If God walked the earth when he got done making it then when you get up in the morning you get to put your feet on a real floor and you don't have to worry about where it come from. But if he didn't then you got to come up with a whole other description of what you even mean by real. And you got to judge everything by that same light. If light is is. Including yourself. One question fits all.

Cormac McCarthy
Books lie, he said. God don't lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.

Cormac McCarthy
He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Cormac McCarthy
War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. — The judge

Cormac McCarthy
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

Cormac McCarthy
He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

Cormac McCarthy
I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone away.

Cormac McCarthy
I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.

Cormac McCarthy
Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing...

Cormac McCarthy
The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.

Cormac McCarthy
When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

Cormac McCarthy
When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

Cormac McCarthy