Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Jabbo and Bungalow came in out of the weather in a bathless reek of cold wool and splo whiskey.

They sat contemplating towns to come and the poor fanfare of trumpet and drum and the crude boards upon which their destinies were inscribed for these people were no less bound and indentured and they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals.

They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded.

Do you carry a gun? No. I own one. You think I should carry it? Statistically it will shorten your life, not lengthen it. The unpleasant truth is that if someone is trying to kill you there is not a whole lot you can do about it. Your only real safety would be in disappearing. And even with that there are no guarantees.

After a while he pulled his hat down over his eyes and stood and placed his hands outstretched on the roof of the cab and rode in that manner. As if he were some personage bearing news for the countryside. As if he were some newfound evangelical being conveyed down out of the mountains....

You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressing table drawer. But that's not what's at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale.

Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded.

She aint worth it. None of em are. He didnt answer for a while. Then he said: Yes they are.

From all old seamy throats of elders, musty books, I've salvaged not a word.

In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete.

He looked at her. After a while he said: It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody's. You don't start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin?

If there was a heaven, was it nor founded upon the writhing bodies of the damned?

There seemed insufficient substance to him to be the object of men's wrath. There seemed nothing about him sufficient to fuel any enterprise at all.

The legacy of the word is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart. Ah

There's a kind of man that when he cant have what he wants he wont take the next best thing but the worst he can find.

My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.

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

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.

do you think if you died drunk you'd sober up before you met Jesus?

The spotlight kept rowing back and forth across the face of the ridge. Methodically. Bright shuttle, dark loom.

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite.

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He's left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

Do you think it would be easier to treat someone who was delusional or someone who only believed that she was?