Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.

Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.

This is a terrible place to die in. Where's a good one?

For things at a common destination there is a common path. Not always easy to see. But there.

He said that even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering and he thought that he'd guessed out likewise for the living a nominal grief like a grange from which disaster and ruin are proportioned by laws of equity too subtle for divining.

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.

I got here the same way the coin did.

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.

Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.

See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere. [ Interview with Oprah Winfrey , June 5, 2007]

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.

The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall

There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn't about death. He wasn't sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all.

The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.

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

Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.

That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I don't think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around that bend and then flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.

The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dimmed and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams encased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night.

I dont know what I ever done, she said. I truly dont. Chigurh nodded. Probably you do, he said. There's a reason for everything. She shook her head. How many times I've said them very words. I wont again.

You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all.

A malign star kept him.

Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein...