Top 100 Cormac McCarthy Quotes
#1. Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.
Cormac McCarthy
#2. The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.
Cormac McCarthy
#4. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Cormac McCarthy
#5. He said that that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it.
Cormac McCarthy
#6. I've no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favor? I
Cormac McCarthy
#7. 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.
Cormac McCarthy
#8. I don't mean to upset you, but reflective men often find themselves at a certain remove from the realities of life.
Cormac McCarthy
#9. Like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die.
Cormac McCarthy
#10. Always so deliberate, hardly surprised by the most outlandish advents. A creation perfectly evolved to meet its own end. They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn.
Cormac McCarthy
#11. She patted his hand. Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There God's plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world.
Cormac McCarthy
#13. Are you no afraid of God? I got no reason to be afraid of God. I've even got a bone or two to pick with Him. You
Cormac McCarthy
#14. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.
Cormac McCarthy
#15. You think you can believe in heaven if you dont believe in hell? I guess you can believe what you want to. Rawlins
Cormac McCarthy
#16. We're like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We don't know what's goin to show up here come daylight. We don't even know what color they'll be.
Cormac McCarthy
#17. Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone.
She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.
Cormac McCarthy
#18. It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.
Cormac McCarthy
#19. If I dont go will you go anyways?
John Grady sat up and put his hat on. I'm already gone, he said.
Cormac McCarthy
#20. In every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die.
Cormac McCarthy
#21. And I said no ma'am I just aim to quit. I ain't ahead by a damn sight. I never will be.
Cormac McCarthy
#22. The man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.
Cormac McCarthy
#24. They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
Cormac McCarthy
#25. He walked to the top of a rise and crouched and watched the day accrue. The chary dawn, the cold illucid world.
Cormac McCarthy
#26. Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen.
Cormac McCarthy
#27. The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future.
Cormac McCarthy
#28. He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought.
Cormac McCarthy
#29. But the old woman said that some have no choice. She said that for the poor any choice was a gift with two faces.
Cormac McCarthy
#30. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has now soul? Why would you say anything?
Cormac McCarthy
#31. Can't stop what's coming. Ain't no waiting on you. That's vanity.
Cormac McCarthy
#32. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.
Cormac McCarthy
#33. You dont want to be the youngest. I can tell you right now. There aint no percentage in it. They
Cormac McCarthy
#34. It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is something I don't want to be wrong about.
Cormac McCarthy
#35. The skiff swung gently, drifting in the current. He undid his shirt to the waist and put one forearm to his eyes. He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face
Cormac McCarthy
#36. There ain't but one life worth livin and I was born to it.
Cormac McCarthy
#37. The moon was already a quarter ways up. All but day bright. He felt like something in a jar.
Cormac McCarthy
#38. God made this world, but he didn't make it to suit everybody, did he?
Cormac McCarthy
#39. Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew. On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.
Cormac McCarthy
#41. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.
Cormac McCarthy
#42. In the night's in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.
Cormac McCarthy
#43. If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I don't believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.
Cormac McCarthy
#44. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
Cormac McCarthy
#45. I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.
Cormac McCarthy
#46. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded.
Cormac McCarthy
#47. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.
Cormac McCarthy
#48. In the dark glass where the road poured down their cigarettes rose and fell like distant semaphores above the soft green dawn of the dashlights.
Cormac McCarthy
#49. He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.
Cormac McCarthy
#50. He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Cormac McCarthy
#51. But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse
Cormac McCarthy
#52. A man is always right to pursue the thing he loves.
No matter even if it kills him?
I think so. Yes. No matter what.
Cormac McCarthy
#53. The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons,coins,men.
Cormac McCarthy
#54. People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.
Cormac McCarthy
#55. Live by yourself and you bound to talk yourself and when ye commence that folks start it up that you're light in the head. But I reckon it's all right to talk to a dog since most folks do even if a dog don't understand and cain't answer if he did.
Cormac McCarthy
#56. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Cormac McCarthy
#58. It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.
Cormac McCarthy
#59. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.
Cormac McCarthy
#60. Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings.
Cormac McCarthy
#61. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. At
Cormac McCarthy
#63. And when he saw the kid standing there looking looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world.
Cormac McCarthy
#65. The hardest lesson in the world:
Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.
Cormac McCarthy
#66. And sleep that night on the cold plains of a foreign land, forty-six men wrapped in their blankets under the selfsame stars, the prairie wolves so like in their yammering, yet all about so changed and strange.
Cormac McCarthy
#67. I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.
Cormac McCarthy
#68. The judge sat that animal bareback like an indian and rode with his grip and his rifle perched on the withers and he looked about him with the greatest satisfaction in the world, as if everything had turned out just as he planned and the day could not have been finer.
Cormac McCarthy
#69. People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.
Cormac McCarthy
#70. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.
Cormac McCarthy
#71. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
Cormac McCarthy
#72. He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them. Y
Cormac McCarthy
#73. They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers.
Cormac McCarthy
#74. He said if he is not the word of God God never spoke (4)
Cormac McCarthy
#75. I aint sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they'd have to build a annex on to hell.
Cormac McCarthy
#76. I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.
Cormac McCarthy
#78. I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.
Cormac McCarthy
#79. He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.
Cormac McCarthy
#81. The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.
Cormac McCarthy
#82. Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.
Cormac McCarthy
#83. Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]
Cormac McCarthy
#84. Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.
Cormac McCarthy
#85. Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?
Cormac McCarthy
#86. When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?
Cormac McCarthy
#87. How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
Cormac McCarthy
#88. Just take me with you. Please.
I cant.
Please, Papa.
I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
Cormac McCarthy
#89. From all old seamy throats of elders, musty books, I've salvaged not a word.
Cormac McCarthy
#90. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin?
Cormac McCarthy
#91. Who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe.
Cormac McCarthy
#92. The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.
Cormac McCarthy
#93. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void.
Cormac McCarthy
#94. Where man can't live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone.
Cormac McCarthy
#95. His subtle obsession with uniqueness troubled all his dreams.
Cormac McCarthy
#96. Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world.
Cormac McCarthy
#97. It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.
Cormac McCarthy
#98. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?
Cormac McCarthy
#99. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.
Cormac McCarthy
#100. People think they know what they want but they generally don't. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways.
Cormac McCarthy
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