Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

What's the bravest thing you ever did? Getting up this morning, he said.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. ... War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. 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... War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god... Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.

You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.

People are always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.

He lay watching the kid. He was from a prominent Kentucky family and had attended Transylvania College and like many another young man of his class he'd gone west because of a woman.

Do you remember that little boy, Papa? Yes. I remember him. Do you think he's all right that little boy? Oh yes. I think he's all right. Do you think he was lost? No. I don't think he was lost. I'm scared that he was lost. I think he's all right. But who will find him if he's lost? Who will find that little boy? Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

Satan hath power to assume a pleasing form. Them big blue eyes. Knew more ways to turn a man's head than the devil's grandmother. I dont know where they learn it at. Hell, she wasnt but seventeen.

He thought there could be deathships out there yet, drifting with their lolling rags of sail. Or life in the deep. Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness. Shuttling past like trains, eyes the size of saucers. And perhaps beyond those shrouded wells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.

I think sometimes some people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all.

I tell you this, as war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? You ain't nothing.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing.

every man is tabernacled in every other, and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.

The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle.

What was it you said? After the math comes the aftermath?

We could of brought weeners, she said. Yeah. Marshmallers. You wouldnt think a car would burn like that.

Me preguntaba de qué soy profesor. Bien, yo profeso la oscuridad. Esa noche disfrazada de día. Y ahora, le deseo lo mejor pero debo irme.

At the farther edge of the town they came upon a solitary house in a field and they crossed and entered and walked through the rooms. They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.

You're pretty much obliged to reckon that at the last suspiration the dying become not only acceptant of death but dedicated to it. That there must be some epiphany that makes it possible for even the dullest and most deluded of us to accept not only what is unacceptable but unimaginable. The absolute terminus of the world. Which will not wonder even for the briefest second what might have become of us.

He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

A rich smell of woodsmoke hung over the road.

But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry (of life) will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge of the world that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.

The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark of the yard like a grave yawning at judgement day in some old apocalyptic painting.