Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
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If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
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It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.
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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.
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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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What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death.
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I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.
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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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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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Whatever exists, he the judge said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
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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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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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How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.
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I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.
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The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.
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I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.
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I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
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His among the clouded faces seemed unperturbed. He looked over the Americans, their gear. In truth, they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadn't drunk.
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The hour that followed was a long hour.
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Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian.
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...he shook his head at the wonderful invention of folly in its guises and forms.
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...hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy.
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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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Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.