Top 100 Cormac's Quotes
#1. Cormac's eyes eyes narrow. "She wasn't half the Spinster you are, Adelice."
"I'm half the person she was," I say with a shrug, barely keeping my voice steady. "So I guess it evens out.
Gennifer Albin
#2. It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong.
Cormac McCarthy
#4. If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around.
Cormac McCarthy
#5. 181. (The) Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare 182. Two Sickles 183. Hats and Socks for the House Elves 184. Dumbledore's Army 185. A Fake Galleon 186. Confundus 187. Cormac McLaggen 188. Professor Slughorn's 189. Charms 190. Ron View the questions for this section
Chris Peacock
#6. The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein convinced that it's all that good a thing.
Cormac McCarthy
#7. Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.
Cormac McCarthy
#8. They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.
Cormac McCarthy
#9. All human love is a faint type of God's; An echoing note from a harmonious whole; A feeble spark from an undying flame; A single drop from an unfathomed sea: But God's is infinite; it fills the earth And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space.
Cormac McCarthy
#10. Do you think God knows what's happenin?
I expect he does.
You think he can stop it?
No. I dont.
Cormac McCarthy
#11. 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
#12. Maybe it's like Mac says. Ever man winds up with the horse that suits him.
Cormac McCarthy
#13. The next day on the far side of the mountain we encountered the two lads that had deserted us. Hangin upside down in a tree. They'd been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man's appearance.
Cormac McCarthy
#14. The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth's end.
Cormac McCarthy
#15. He said that in an case the past was little more than a dream and its force in the world was greatly exaggerated. for the world was made each day and it was only men's clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more
Cormac McCarthy
#16. I dont know what I ever done, she said. I truly dont.
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 wont again.
Cormac McCarthy
#17. 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
#18. And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys.
Cormac McCarthy
#19. 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
#20. Cormac and I have an understanding."
Erik raises an eyebrow. Clearly he's got the wrong idea.
"Don't worry. It's a death-threat thing.
Gennifer Albin
#21. 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
#22. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
Cormac McCarthy
#23. We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.
Cormac McCarthy
#24. The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad?
What do you think?
Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here.
Yeah.
You don't think that's so great.
It's okay.
Cormac McCarthy
#25. Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not"
-Judge Holden
Cormac McCarthy
#26. It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo's clamor.
Cormac McCarthy
#27. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
Cormac McCarthy
#28. It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it?
Yes. It does.
There's a lot of things look better at a distance.
Yeah?
I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one.
Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.
Cormac McCarthy
#29. This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.
Cormac McCarthy
#30. I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.
Cormac McCarthy
#31. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
Cormac McCarthy
#32. 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
#33. He said that the world was sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men's imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen.
Cormac McCarthy
#34. No one has a name in 'The Road.' Like Cormac McCarthy's novel from which it's adapted, 'The Road' features characters such as the man, the boy, the wife, the old man and the veteran.
Garret Dillahunt
#35. The wisdom of the journeyman is to work one day at a time and he always said that any job even if it took years was made up out of a day's work. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was hard for me to learn. I always wanted to be finished. In the concept of a day's work is rythme and pace and wholeness.
Cormac McCarthy
#36. Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch.
Cormac McCarthy
#37. Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
Cormac McCarthy
#38. What is it?
Nothing. I had a bad dream.
What did you dream about?
Nothing.
Are you okay?
No.
He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said.
I was crying. But you didnt wake up.
I'm sorry. I was just so tired.
I meant in the dream.
Cormac McCarthy
#39. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.
Cormac McCarthy
#40. 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
#41. People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.
Cormac McCarthy
#42. I punched to line. "Yes? What?"
"Norville. It's Cormac. If you don't change the subject right now, I'm going to have to go over there and have a word with you.
Carrie Vaughn
#43. 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
#44. A lawyer aint a priest. Nor a doctor. Law's more vagrant than sickness or sin. We make our case. We'd be fools to say what a dozen other fools might think of it.
Cormac McCarthy
#45. Satan hath power to assume a pleasing form. Them big blue eyes. Knew more ways to turn a man's head than the devil's grandmother. I dont know where they learn it at. Hell, she wasnt but seventeen.
Cormac McCarthy
#46. He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth's cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.
Cormac McCarthy
#47. The hardest lesson in the world:
Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.
Cormac McCarthy
#48. It is always one's stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one's enemies. Or discourages it.
Cormac McCarthy
#50. Miss me?" he asks.
"It hasn't been that long," I remind him.
"I'm sure it's felt like a lifetime," he says, running his eyes down me. "Adelice, you are looking ... malnourished."
"Cormac, you're looking overdressed.
Gennifer Albin
#51. It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing.
Cormac McCarthy
#52. Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.
Tommy Lee Jones
#53. There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.
Cormac McCarthy
#54. Boyd aint goin nowhere. If I am he is. Boyd's a juvenile. They aint goin to turn him over to you. Hell. You're a juvenile yourself. I aint askin.
Cormac McCarthy
#55. When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.
Cormac McCarthy
#56. This is a terrible place to die in.
Where's a good one?
Cormac McCarthy
#57. To have a child when you're older, it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things, you know, afresh. It forces the world on you. And I think it's a good thing.
Cormac McCarthy
#58. 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
#59. There's a difference between quittin and knowin when you're beat.
Cormac McCarthy
#60. I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Zack Snyder
#61. 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
#62. Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.
Cormac McCarthy
#63. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing.
Cormac McCarthy
#64. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.
Cormac McCarthy
#65. One thing about me, when I'm wrong I'll admit it. Well. That's a good trait to have.
Cormac McCarthy
#66. I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]
Cormac McCarthy
#67. Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.
Cormac McCarthy
#68. 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
#69. You think when you wake up in the mornin 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. Nothin else.
Cormac McCarthy
#70. The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.
Cormac McCarthy
#71. It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.
Cormac McCarthy
#72. The uncle lit up and blew smoke in a thin blue viper's breath toward the window. It coiled and diffused in the yellow light. He smiled. I'd like to have a dollar for every time I quit, he said.
Cormac McCarthy
#73. 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
#74. It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?
If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.
Cormac McCarthy
#75. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.
Cormac McCarthy
#76. Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick.
Cormac McCarthy
#77. Men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent's flesh for its bite.
Cormac McCarthy
#78. You have to carry the fire."
I don't know how to."
Yes, you do."
Is the fire real? The fire?"
Yes it is."
Where is it? I don't know where it is."
Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.
Cormac McCarthy
#79. No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.
Cormac McCarthy
#80. 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
#81. Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.
Cormac McCarthy
#82. There was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.
Cormac McCarthy
#83. So, Cormac, have you ever dealt with a PMSing werewolf?'
No.'
Well, it's a real bitch ...
Carrie Vaughn
#84. Can't stop what's coming. Ain't no waiting on you. That's vanity.
Cormac McCarthy
#85. 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
#86. It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.
Cormac McCarthy
#88. Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.
Cormac McCarthy
#89. All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.
Cormac McCarthy
#90. There ain't no law in Mexico. It's just a pack of rogues.
Cormac McCarthy
#91. The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
Cormac McCarthy
#92. There, he said. You see? You see how this is bad for one's billiard game? This thinking? The French have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game. No evil is beyond them.
Cormac McCarthy
#93. Oh, my god, you moron, she's one of us. She's a Keeper! Humans don't spit bullets back out! I gotta go get Cormac. This isn't good.
Donna Augustine
#94. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it's all that more likely it'll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter.
Cormac McCarthy
#95. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.
Cormac McCarthy
#96. There's too much shit still down the road that I got to deal with. It aint goin to end here.
Cormac McCarthy
#97. He imagined that in his estate of eternal night he might somehow have already halved the distance to death. That the transition for him could not be so great for the world was already at some certain distance and if it were not death's terrain he encroached upon in his darkness then whose?
Cormac McCarthy
#98. 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
#99. If you knew there was somebody out there afoot that had two million dollars of your money, at what point would you quit lookin for em?
That's right. There aint no such a point.
Cormac McCarthy
#100. This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.
Cormac McCarthy
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