Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

If I think about what I wanted as a kid and what I want now they aint the same thing. I guess what I wanted wasnt what I wanted. . . .Hell, I dont know what I want. Never did. . . . When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I tink you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.

Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease.

Billy lit a cigarette with a brand from the fire and laid the brand back He smoked. It looks a lot better from up here than it doesn down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.

And it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems.

When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.

You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

God made this world, but he didn't make it to suit everybody, did he?

How would you know if you were the last man on earth? he said. I dont guess you would know it. You'd just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldnt make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too. I guess God would know it. Is that it? There is no God. No? There is no God and we are his prophets.

Do you wish you would die? No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you've always got that ahead of you. Or you might wish you'd never been born. Well. Beggars cant be choosers.

He'd long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outerwear as well. A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape.

It's all right to say that the reason we cant fully grasp the quantum world is because we didnt evolve in that world.

Pami?taj, ?e to, co wpuszczasz do g?owy, pozostaje w niej na zawsze.

When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are going to be.... You get a little older and you pull back on some of that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.

They were saddened that [Rawlins] was not coming back but they said that a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.

each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

I dont know how it would of turned out if I hadnt worried.

the space which [books] occupied was itself an expectation.

There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.

In an ideal world the gossip of the idle would be of no consequence. But I have seen the consequences in the real world and they can be very grave indeed.

Em que é que o que nunca existirá difere do que nunca existiu?

The hour. There is no later. This is later. 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.

As pessoas estavam sempre a preparar-se para o futuro. Eu não acreditava nisso. O futuro não se estava a preparar para elas. O futuro nem sabia que elas existiam.

E se eu te dissesse que ele é um deus? O velho abanou a cabeça. Já não acredito em nada disso. Deixei de acreditar há anos. Onde os homens não conseguem viver, os deuses não têm melhor sorte. Vais ver. É melhor estar sozinho.

The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary.