Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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The old man … said … the notion that men can be understood was probably an illusion.
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Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen.
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You think about all that stuff that can happen to you, he said. There aint no end to it.
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You are the oveja negre, no? The black sheep?
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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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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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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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What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It’s a great thing, the dance.
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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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Jackson, pistols drawn, lurched into the street vowing to shoot the ass off Jesus Christ, the longlegged white son of a bitch.
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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 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.
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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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Getting hurt changed me, he said. Changed my perspective. I've moved on, in a way. Some things have fallen into place that were not there before. I thought they were, but they werent. The best way I can put it is that I've sort of caught up with myself. That's not a bad thing. It was overdue.
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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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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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Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
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Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole.
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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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This is a terrible place to die in.Where’s a good one?
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Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. - The judge
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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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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.