Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole.
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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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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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How many is there, John?.Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?
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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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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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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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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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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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It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood, and this is a thing that even God-who knows all that can be known-seems powerless to change.
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If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?
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...words were said that could not be put right again...
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God don't lie.... And these are his words.... He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
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When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world.
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...death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape.
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Where is your country? he said.I don't know, said John Grady. I don't know where it is. I don't know what happens to country.
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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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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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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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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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Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.
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War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. - The judge
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How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.