Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses (1992)

45 Sourced Quotes

View all Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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
I can't back up and start over. But I don't see the point in slobbering over it. And I can't see where it would make me feel better to be able to point a finger at somebody else.

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

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

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

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

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

Cormac McCarthy
It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.

Cormac McCarthy
Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.

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

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

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

Cormac McCarthy
In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.

Cormac McCarthy
He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to holo

Cormac McCarthy
He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

Cormac McCarthy
There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

Cormac McCarthy
There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

Cormac McCarthy
What good do you think it does to waller all over a horse thataway? said Rawlins. I don't know, said John Grady. I ain't a horse.

Cormac McCarthy
She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

Cormac McCarthy
You either stick or you quit. And I wouldn't quit you, I don't care what you done.

Cormac McCarthy
He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Cormac McCarthy