Cormac McCarthy - No Country for Old Men (2005)

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You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

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
Nothing wounded goes uphill, he said. It just don't happen.

Cormac McCarthy
I don't aim to quit while I'm ahead. I just aim to quit.

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

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
If it ain't a mess, it'll do till the mess gets here.

Cormac McCarthy
There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy.

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
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
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
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
You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There ain't no such thing as a bargain promise.

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
People think they know what they want but they generally don't. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways.

Cormac McCarthy
One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

Cormac McCarthy
I guess you ought to be careful about cussin the dead. I would say at the least there probably ain't no luck in it.

Cormac McCarthy
I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didn't know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal.

Cormac McCarthy
You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.

Cormac McCarthy
Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldn't even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it?

Cormac McCarthy
The stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the saying goes. Which I reckon some would take as meaning that the truth can't compete. But I don't believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It don't move about from place to place and it don't change from time to time. You can't corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You can't corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talking about. I've heard it compared to the rock — maybe in the bible—and I wouldn't disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.

Cormac McCarthy
It had already occurred to him that he would probably never be safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to. And if you did?

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
All the time you spend trying to get back what's been took from you there's more going out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Cormac McCarthy