Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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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.
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The old man … said … the notion that men can be understood was probably an illusion.
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I could have been somebody in this world wasn’t for him.
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Men are made of the dust of the earth.
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For the Earth is a globe in a void the truth there's no up nor down to it.
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What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It’s a great thing, the dance.
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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.
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Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee. - The judge
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Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
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My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.
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Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls. (p.128)
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It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.
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Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.
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You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value.
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There aint but one truth, said John Grady. The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody's mouth.
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He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
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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.
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Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
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I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.
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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. (p.158)
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You are the oveja negre, no? The black sheep?
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Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
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In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. (p.130)
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Word gets around when the circus comes to town, dont it?