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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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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There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.
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...words were said that could not be put right again...
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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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You are the oveja negre, no? The black sheep?
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How many is there, John?.Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?
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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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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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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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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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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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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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If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
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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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...death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape.
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Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole.
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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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Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
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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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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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God don't lie.... And these are his words.... He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
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If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.