Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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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.
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It had already occurred to him that he would probably never be safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to. And if you did?
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The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.
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It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.
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I’ll tell you somethin, Sheriff. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter. I think about that
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When you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon somethin that you may very well not be equal to and I think that this is one of them things. When you've said that it's real and not just in your head I'm not all that sure what it is you have said.
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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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Where is yesterday? … And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?
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I didnt know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal.
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Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian.
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The hour that followed was a long hour.
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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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What good do you think it does to waller all over a horse thataway? said Rawlins.I dont know, said John Grady. I aint a horse.
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… and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be.
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Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case.
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And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief.
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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 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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A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.
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Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.
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It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong. (p.71)
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All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.
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The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons, coins, men. His hands moved as if he were pulling something from one fist in a series of elongations. Watch the coin, Davey, he said.