Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

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

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.

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

They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.

In every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die.

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?

But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?

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.

Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.

Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?

Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.

Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said

When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

If a man's at odds to know his own mind it's because he hasn't got aught but his mind to know it with.

He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.

Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.

Scared money can't win and a worried man can't love.

Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.

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

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.