Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.
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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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God don't lie.... And these are his words.... He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
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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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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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Word gets around when the circus comes to town, dont it?
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Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
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You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
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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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My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.
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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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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.
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Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments. - The judge.
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Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them
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There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.
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I don't aim to quit while I'm ahead. I just aim to quit.
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The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
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...and he is as eitherhanded as a spider,...
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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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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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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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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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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.