Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.
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...words were said that could not be put right again...
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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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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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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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It's not about knowin where 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 cant make it go away. None of it.
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If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
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The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.
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For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.
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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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How many is there, John?.Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?
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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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I cant back up and start over. But I dont see the point in slobberin over it. And I cant see where it would make me feel better to be able to point a finger at somebody else.
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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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He knew that fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.
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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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It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.
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Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole.
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Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath. (p.149)
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Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.
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Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
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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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How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
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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.