Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.

Who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe.

Wrinkle not thy sable brow at me, my friend. All will be known to you at last. To you as to every man.

But the kid only spat into the darkness of the space between them. I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.

the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past.

White: We were born in such a fix as this. Suffering and human destiny are the same thing. Each is a description of the other. Black: We aint talkin about sufferin. We talkin about bein happy. White: Well you cant be happy if you're in pain. Black: Why not?

The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.

Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.

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.

You'd think a man that had waited eighty some odd years on God to come into his life, well, you'd think he'd come. If he didnt you'd still have to figure that he knew what he was doin. I don't know what other description of God you could have. So what you end up with is that those he has spoke to are the ones that must of needed it the worst. That's not a easy thing to accept.

This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.

Teaching writing is a hustle.

The dust the party raised was quickly dispersed and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale sutler who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and his lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground. By a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk he keeps his commissary and he's a wry and grinning tradesman good to follow every campaign or hound men from their holds in just those whited regions where they've gone to hide from God.

He said that the world was sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men's imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen.

He walked out on the beach to the edge of the light and stood with his clenched fists on top of his skull and fell to his knees sobbing in rage.

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he'd watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.

The man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.

the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa? Yes. We are. And nothing bad is going to happen to us. That's right. Because we're carrying the fire. Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be.

The breath of God was his yet, though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps of love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans.

She looked away. You make it like it was the coin. But you're the one. It could have gone either way. The coin didn't have no say. It was just you. Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.