Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.

In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.

They struggled forever in the roads cold coagulate.

We'll just take it one step at a time. Okay. Don't let go. Okay. No matter what. No matter what.

Females of domestic reputation lounged upon the balconies they passed with faces gotten up in indigo and almagre gaudy as the rumps of apes and they peered from behind their fans with a kind of lurid coyness like transvestites in a madhouse.

A man of broad principles. Of liberal sentiments. Even a generous man...Yet one might say that his way through the world was so broad it scarcely made a path at all

They went on in the perfect blackness, sightless as the blind.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.

Life is being in bed with you. Everything else is just waiting.

It's just that the passing of time is irrevocably the passing of you. And then nothing.

Dont let go. Okay. No matter what. No matter what.

The boy's candlecolored skin was all but translucent.

The boy was sitting quietly on the bunk, still wrapped in the blanket, watching. The man thought he had probably not fully committed himself to any of this. You could wake in the dark wet woods at any time.

Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell.

I got no reason to be afraid of God. I've even got a bone or two to pick with Him.

En sus sueños su pálida novia iba hacia él desde una verde bóveda de ramas. Sus pezones como de marga y sus costillas pintadas de blanco. Llevaba un vestido de gasa y sus cabellos oscuros estaban recogidos con peinetas de marfil, peinetas de concha. Su sonrisa, su mirada baja. Por la mañana volvía a nevar. Cuentas de hielo gris en ristra sobre los cables de electricidad.

He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with vigor unknown to the sane. Suttree admired them with their hot eyes and dogeared bibles, God's barkers gone forth into the world like the prophets of old.

What loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peeled, blue and bulbous and palely luminescent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I.

Tell us where the world went.

Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian. Let's go then. Hump up there, stranger, and let's go get hung.

If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.

They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I dont dream at all.

Do you think you can learn all there is to know about yourself from yourself?

What do you say to em? Say to them? Yeah. Say. Hell, say anything. It doesnt matter, they dont listen. Well you gotta say somethin. What do you say? Try the direct approach. What's that? Well, like this friend of mine. Went up to this girl and said I sure would like to have a little pussy. No shit? What'd she say? She said I would too. Mine's as big as your hat.