Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly.

The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor.

That's so, said the judge. They do not have to have a reason. But order is not set aside because of their indifference.

They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.

I couldn't trust you with it. To do something with it. I don't want anybody talking about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean, you could talk about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody. I think in times like these the less said the better. If something had happened and we were survivors and we met on the road then we'd have something to talk about. But we're not. So we don't.

You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

watching the flames twist in the wind.

Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.

The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will.

The defeated have their cause and the victors have their victory.

Housecats is smart too. Smarter'n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain't on account of you cain't learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won't learn nothin. They too smart.

Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.

The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.

You're not the one who has to worry about everything. The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

It must surely be true that there is no such collective domain of joy as there is of sorrow. You cant be sure that another man's happiness resembles your own. But where the collective of pain is concerned there can be little doubt at all.

woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death. To that I have no answer.

She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?

I think what is being pointed out is that human consciousness and reality are not the same thing.

You wont man that son of a bitch, said Brown. I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky.

I suppose it should be a comfort to understand that one cannot be dead forever where there's no forever to be dead in.