Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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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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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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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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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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I don't aim to quit while I'm ahead. I just aim to quit.
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The hour that followed was a long hour.
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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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A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.
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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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...hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy.
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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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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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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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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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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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… 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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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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He said we were full of shit. But in a nice way.
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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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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.
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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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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 they went down to the bunkhouse for dinner the vaqueros seemed to treat them with a certain deference but whether it was the deference accorded the accomplished or that accorded to mental defectives they were unsure.
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The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.