Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

The enemy of your undertaking is despair.

Se solo il mio cuore fosse pietra.

A small soul's going. By floodlight through the universe's renal regions. Pale phagocytes drifting over, shadows and shapes through the tubes like the miscellany in a waterdrop. The eye at the end of the glass would be God's.

That it's caring that heals, not theory. Good the world over. And it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems. As moonminded as Carl Jung was he was probably right about that. Keeping

In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased.

Buddy when he come back from up in the panhandle told me one time it quit blowin up there and all the chickens fell over.

keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

How're you doin Ed Tom. I aint braggin.

Gusci di uomini senza fede che avanzavano barcollanti sul selciato come nomadi in una terra febbricitante. La rivelazione finale della fragilità di ogni cosa. Vecchie e spinose questioni si erano risolte in tenebre e nulla. L'ultimo esemplare di una data cosa si porta con sé la categoria. Spegne la luce e scompare. Guardati intorno. Mai è un sacco di tempo. Ma il bambino la sapeva lunga. E sapeva che mai è l'assenza di qualsiasi tempo.

Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature

They're not any smarter than they have to be and they're just as smart as they need to be.

They were all day among the dunes and in the evening coming down from the last low sandhills to the plain below among catclaw and crucifixion thorn they were a parched and haggard lot man and beast. Harpie eagles flew up screaming from a dead mule and wheeled off westward into the sun as they led the horses out onto the plain.

It was for us and it will be for others

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift

Because he knows what perhaps you do not. That the past cannot be mended.

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. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also 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.

But the old woman said that some have no choice. She said that for the poor any choice was a gift with two faces.

His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel. He

These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldnt even understand, well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you. But what if you'd of told em it was their own grandchildren?

I aint drinkin after no mule, said the hermit. Have you not got no old bucket nor nothin?

Yet the captain inhabited another space and it was a space of his own election and outside the common world of men.

Call it, friend-O (No Country For Old Men)

Torbert nodded. You and the sheriff goin to come down and get me off of death row? If we cant get you out we'll get in there with you. You all dont be makin light of the dead thataway, Bell said. Wendell nodded. Yessir, he said. You're right. I might be one myself some day.