Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you've no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you're defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself.

The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead. You think that nuclear war is inevitable. I agree with Plato that only the dead have seen an end to war. And people dont fight with rocks when they have guns. Etcetera and so on.

Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it's all that more likely it'll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter.

They came to know the night skys well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients.

Each memory but a memory of the one before until…What? Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoved into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.

Ich kann nicht anders.

If you break little promises you'll break big ones.

You might think that fingerprints and numbers give you a distinct identity. But soon there will be no identity so distinct as simply to have none. The truth is that everyone is under arrest. Or soon will be. They dont have to restrict your movements. They just have to know where you are.

A dead man's dog ain't got a name.

His dreams brightened. The vanished world returned.

God) He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

He said that that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it.

In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

If psychosis was was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static?

A man gets older, he said, he finds they's lots of things he can do jest as well without and so he don't have to worry about this and that the way a young feller will. I worked near all my life and never had nothin. Seems like a old man'd be allowed his rest but then he comes to find they's things you have to do on account of nobody else wants to attend to em... Most ever man loves peace, he said, and none better than a old man.

Lejos, en la llanura, en la noche sin orilla, podían ver como en un reflejo de su propio fuego en un lago oscuro el fuego de los vaqueros a unos ocho kilómetros. Por la noche llovió y la lluvia silbó en el fuego y los caballos se acercaron desde la oscuridad con sus ojos rojos parpadeando inquietos y por la mañana hacía frío y todo era gris y el sol tardó mucho en salir.

Almighty God, if it aint too far out of the way of things in your eternal plan do you reckon we could have a little rain down here.

I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He'd killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it.

I don't mean to upset you, but reflective men often find themselves at a certain remove from the realities of life.

God speaks in the least of creatures.

I just meant maybe you could set here and drink one of em with me. He squinted at her. You ever notice how women have trouble takin no for a answer? I think it starts about age three. What about men? They get used to it. They better.

We none of us knew him to speak [Dutch]. Asked him where he'd learned it you know what he said? What did he say. Said off a Dutchman.

You shouldnt worry about what people think of you because they dont do it that often

John Grady looked at the table. The paper cat stepped thin and slant among the shapes of cats thereon. He looked up again. Yessir, he said. Just me and him.