Cormac McCarthy Quotes

By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.

It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.

If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

You have my whole heart. You always did.

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse

Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch.

Ah me, thou Destiny, Giver of evil gifts.

I'd rather to make a good run as a bad stand.

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on somethin that was eatin you.

You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.

He didn't say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don't remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.

Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.

You go back home and everything you wished was different is still the same and everything you wished was the same is different.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.

If you break little promises, you'll break big ones.

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down." -The Judge

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?

Any time you're throwin dirt you're losin ground.

Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

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.

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

There's a difference between quittin and knowin when you're beat.

What joins men together ... is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

Ever step you take is forever.

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.

Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen.