Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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I could have been somebody in this world wasn’t for him.
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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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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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You think about all that stuff that can happen to you, he said. There aint no end 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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Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls. (p.128)
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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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Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Word gets around when the circus comes to town, dont it?
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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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The man sat watching the road, the weedstem twirling in his mouth and the threadthin shadow of it going long and short upon his face like a sundial's hand beneath a sun berserk.
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The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full.
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What discordant vespers do the tinker's goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of the day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema.