Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.

They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Where men can't live gods fare no better.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. 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.

How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay.

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned

You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.

I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.

When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.