Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

How do I know you're one of the good guys? You dont. You'll have to take a shot. Are you carrying the fire? Am I what? Carrying the fire. You're kind of weirded out, arent you? No. Just a little. Yeah. That's okay. So are you? What, carrying the fire? Yes. Yeah, We are.

For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?

In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry for a thousand years.

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

Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don't.

The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror that men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.

My daddy once told me that some of the most miserable people he ever knew were the ones that finally got what they'd always wanted.

in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.

Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.

There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.

If fate is the law, then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It's in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.

If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys.

Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.

Where you've nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air, and breathe upon them.

Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone. She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.

This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up.

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

In a world darksome as this'n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most.

You either stick or you quit. And I wouldnt quit you I dont care what you done.

He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.

In the spaniards heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love for truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.