Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Meanin I guess that he seen somebody in a place low enough to where he ought to be ready to take a pretty big step.

As for myself again if I cant be decorum's sworn enemy while savoring its fruits I simply see no place for me at all.

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison.

People think they know what they want but they generally dont. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways. People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things.

Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?

He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque.

It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.

Well. I think maybe it's harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything.

You got good eyes, she said. Yes mam, he said. I always did. Well I guess so, she said. You dont normally start out with bad ones and they get better.

Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.

He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death.

Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.

So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? 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.

All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various times after they'd said they'd be there. I never heard one yet that didnt have a reason for it. Yessir. But there aint but one reason. Yessir. You know what it is? No sir. It's that their word's no good. That's the only reason there ever was or ever will be. Yessir.

Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?

The founders of quantum mechanics—Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg—had nothing to guide them but an intuition about how the world should be.

Will you hide me? Hide you? Yes. The kid spat. You caint hide. Where you goin to hide at? Will he come back? I dont know. This is a terrible place to die in. Where's a good one?

When he woke in the woods in

What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions.

I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.

What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach ( . . . ) That the man knows not how to even name that which enslaves him hardly lightens his burden.

Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all.