Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness.

To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.

Son, not everbody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven.

Even in this world, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether. He listened. Above the black ranks of trees the mid-summer sky arched cloudless and coldly starred. He lay back and stared at it and after a while he slept.

You wear out, Ed Tom. 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. Your grandad never asked me to sign on as deputy with him. I done that my own self. Hell, I didn't have nothing else to do. Paid about the same as cowboyin. Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming.

He turned and looked at the boy. Standing with his suitcase like an orphan waiting for a bus.

Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

I feel old, Squire. Every conversation is about the past.

Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth's crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth's wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with root, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes. The kid didn't answer. The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he? I don't believe he much had me in mind.

They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.

If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.

And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled. Books lie, he said. God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

It just bothered me that you might think I'm somethin special. I aint.

He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death

We're carrying the fire.

A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.

I want the dead to be dead forever. I don't want to be one of them, Except of course you can't be one of them. You can't be one of the dead because that which, has no existence can have no community. No community! My heart warms just thinking about it-- blackness, aloneness ,silence, peace, and all of it only a heartbeat away.