Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes.

His subtle obsession with uniqueness troubled all his dreams.

All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.

I know all the people I want to know.

He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought.

Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.

Dark of the invisible moon. The night now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

White pussy is nothin but trouble.

I dont think you havin a bad day, Professor. I think you havin a bad life.

Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

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.

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

In a pocket of his knapsack he'd found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy and then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim. You promised not to do that, the boy said. What? You know what, Papa. He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy's cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back. I have to watch you all the time, the boy said.

What is it? Nothing. I had a bad dream. What did you dream about? Nothing. Are you okay? No. He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said. I was crying. But you didnt wake up. I'm sorry. I was just so tired. I meant in the dream.

Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be? It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him. The smell of coalsmoke in the air at night. Old times, dead years. For him such memories are bitter ones.

You never know when you'll be in need of them you've despised

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all