Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Quindi bisogna essere parsimoniosi. Ciò che si altera ricordando ha comunque una sua realtà, che la si conosca o meno.

The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.

Or even knows they need attendin to. But I never done it to benefit myself. Shot that thing. Like I kept peace for seven year sake of a man I never knowed nor seen his face and like I seen them fellers never had no business there and if I couldn't run em off I could anyway let em know they was one man would let on that he knowed what they was up to. But I knowed if they could build it they could build it back and I done it anyway. Ever man loves peace and a old man best of all.

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledger book? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

Just remember that the things you put in your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, don't you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

You'd be a woreout sumbuck. I'll tell you that. Think how good you'd sleep.

They put their animals to the ford and crossed, the water up under the horses' bellies and the horses picking their way over the rocks and glancing wildly upstream where a cataract thundered out of the darkening forest into the flecked and seething pool below.

There's no such thing as life without bloodshed, McCarthy says philosophically. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Glanton was first to reach the dying man and he knelt with that alien and barbarous head cradled between his thighs like some reeking outland nurse and dared off the savages with his revolver. They circled on the plain and shook their bows and lofted a few arrows at him and then turned and rode on. Blood bubbled from the man's chest and he turned his lost eyes upward, already glazed, the capillaries breaking up. In those dark pools there sat each a small and perfect sun.

one pounding coffeebeans in a buckskin with a rock while the others stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores.

What are you going to do? Go to sleep. I mean long range. I'm talking long range.

There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the night have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be 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 i agreed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God- who knows all that can be known- seems powerless to change.

The rain had ripened all the country around and the roadside grass was luminous and green from the run-off and flowers were in bloom across the open country. He slept that night in a field far from any town. He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.

It makes no difference what men think of war ... War endures.

The judge sat that animal bareback like an indian and rode with his grip and his rifle perched on the withers and he looked about him with the greatest satisfaction in the world, as if everything had turned out just as he planned and the day could not have been finer.

Don't be ignorant your whole life.

It's a mess, ain't it Sheriff If it ain't it'll do til a mess gets here

It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.

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 and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness.

Nessuna lista di cose da fare. Ogni giornata sufficiente a se stessa. Ogni ora. Non c'è un dopo. Il dopo è già qui. Tutte le cose piene di grazia e bellezza che ci portiamo nel cuore hanno un'origine comune nel dolore. Nascono dal cordoglio e dalle ceneri. Ecco, sussurrò al bambino addormentato. Io ho te.

She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn't forget. The woman said it was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everbody is goin to get older with you. You

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

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.