Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.

That the boy was all that stood between him and death.

The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.

He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.

He looked into those blue eyes like a man seeking some vision of the increate future of the universe.

If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.

In what direction did lost men veer?

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

How can you believe in heaven if you don't believe in hell?

Ever is a long time.

He said I was bein hard on myself. Said it was a sign of old age. Tryin to set things right. I guess there's some truth to that. But it aint the whole truth. I agreed with him that there wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I waited for him to smile but he didn't. I said well, that's pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the facts called for. So that was all there was about that.

They rode in a narrow enfillade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bakeoven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?

The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself.

Nobody comes with names. You give them names so that you can find them in the dark.

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.

The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body

You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?

If we were going to die would you tell me? I dont know. We're not going to die.

Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules . . . The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.

When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too.

His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.

I would like to belong but I dont.