Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you've got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death.

The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a reason.

The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.

The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they'd never imagined.

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else. Probably the best way is to be from Mars.

Salió a la gris luz y se quedó allí de pie y fugazmente vio la verdad absoluta del mundo. El frío y despiado girar de la tierra intestada. Oscuridad implacable. Los perros ciegos del sol en su carrera. El aplastante vacío negro del universo. Y en alguna parte dos animales perseguidos temblando como zorros escondidos en su madriguera. Tiempo prestado y mundo prestado y ojos prestados con que llorarlo.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

Ten thousand dreams ensepulchered within their crozzled hearts.

Where man can't live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone.

He had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

She asked the girl what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said dead.

Do you think I lie to you? No. But you think I might lie to you about dying. Yes. Okay. I might. But we're not dying. Okay.

In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

The wisdom of the journeyman is to work one day at a time and he always said that any job even if it took years was made up out of a day's work. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was hard for me to learn. I always wanted to be finished. In the concept of a day's work is rythme and pace and wholeness.

The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale.

The judge is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

All of history [is] a rehearsal for its own extinction.

He couldn't remember where he was. The thought made him smile

People were always getting ready for tomorrow.

And sleep that night on the cold plains of a foreign land, forty-six men wrapped in their blankets under the selfsame stars, the prairie wolves so like in their yammering, yet all about so changed and strange.

If he is not the word of God God never spoke

The man's labor that did the work is in the work. You can't make it go away. Even if it's paid for it's still there. If ownership lies in the benefit to a man then the mason owns all the work he does in the world and you caint put that claim aside nor quit it and it don't make no difference whose name is on the paper.