Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future.

The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as we once were and yet we mourn the days.

Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.

Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.

Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.

For let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures. The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life. Is that right? Aye.

If I dont go will you go anyways? John Grady sat up and put his hat on. I'm already gone, he said.

He may be dead; or he may be teaching English.

Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.

They had no curiousity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.

See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed & the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history & will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns & cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's all the same thing.

I think our time is up. I know. Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that's what people do when they're waiting for the end of something.

He'd stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.

All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various times after they'd said they'd be there. I never heard one yet that didnt have a reason for it. Yessir. But there aint but one reason. Yessir. You know what it is? No sir. It's that their word's no good. That's the only reason there ever was or ever will be.

And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt.

There's two kinds of people that dont ask a lot of questions. One is too dumb to and the other dont need to.

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.

You don't know shit from apple butter.

And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.

They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart.