Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into the shoreless void where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain, gravely canted and veering out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn to the uttermost rebate of space.

A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the churchbells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly behind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of childhood. This is the day to shape the days upon.

Those who cannot see must rely upon what has gone before. If I do not wish to appear so foolish as to drink from an empty glass I must remember whether I have drained it or not.

He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?

Most people'll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They cant wait to see him.

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

With the final onset of dark the iron cold locked down and the boy by now was shuddering violently. No moon rose beyond the murk and there was nowhere to go.

People are interested in other people. But your unconscious is not. Or only as they might directly affect you. It's been hired to do a very specific job. It never sleeps. It's more faithful than God.

Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard.

Always so deliberate, hardly surprised by the most outlandish advents. A creation perfectly evolved to meet its own end. They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn.

Él le cogió la mano y cruzaron la calle hasta el hotel. Intentó leerle el corazón en el apretón de su mano, pero no adivinó nada.

To win a war or a revolution does not validate the cause.

I'm not really concerned about what other people believe. I dont consider them qualified to have an opinion.

Don't fear Death. Its only gonna help you die faster, its not gonna help you live.

Who is it? said the boy. I dont know. Who is anybody?

He looked up. His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he'd been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was.

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 didnt.

All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not

He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.

Cuando sueñes con un mundo que nunca existió o con un mundo que no existirá y estés contento otra vez entonces te habrás rendido. ¿Lo entiendes? Y no puedes rendirte. Yo no lo permitiré.

He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied.

Nothing. Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life. He held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in the blackness.