Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death.

Young people anymore they seem to have a hard time growin up. I dont know why. Maybe it's just that you dont grow up any faster than what you have to.

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the moon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

In die schmutzigen Decken gehüllt, gingen sie durch die Straßen. Er hielt den Revolver auf Hüfthöhe und den Jungen bei der Hand. AM anderen Ende der Stadt stießen sie auf ein für sich stehendes Haus auf einer Wiese und gingen durch sämtliche Zimmer. Sie trafen auf sich selbst in einem Spiegel, und er hätte beinahe den Revolver gehoben. Das sind wir Papa, flüsterte der Junge. Das sind wir.

Let me put it to you this way. As the vicar said to the choirboy. To the seasoned traveler a destination is at best a rumor.

He slept little and he slept poorly.

You can get from the noumenal to the phenomenal without stirring from your chair. In other words, nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

Really. Been married once. No children. Amicably divorced. I dont have any tragedies in my life to give it a form and destination outside of my control. I like what I'm doing. But I could be doing something else. I've been blessed. I'm not even sure I'd change the bad things. Here comes the food.

There's little equity in the Lord's gifts.

The frailty of everything revealed at last.

I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy.

He'd bivouacked on the north side of the town

Los que no pueden recordar la sangre de la guerra son siempre los más ardientes para la lucha.

I thought if I lived my life in the strictest way I knew how then I would not ever again have a thing that would eat on me thataway. I said that I was twenty-one years old and I was entitled to one mistake, particularly if I could learn from it and become the sort of man I had it in my mind to be.

Lumea nu are nici un nume. Numele de cerros, sierras si deserturi exista numai pe harti. Le punem nume ca sa nu ne ratacim. Dar am inventat aceste nume tocmai pentru ca am ratacit deja drumul. Lumea nu se poate pierde. Noi ne pierdem. Si tocmai pentru ca noi am pus numele acestea si am numit aceste coordonate, numele lor nu ne poate salva. Nu pot regasi drumul in locul nostru.

The other thing is the old people, and I keep comin back to them. They look at me it's always a question. Years back I dont remember that. I dont remember it when I was sheriff back in the fifties. You see em and they dont even look confused. They just look crazy. That bothers me. It's like they woke up and they dont know how they got where they're at. Well, in a manner of speakin they dont.

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. Wealth. Power. 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. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations.

Loretta told me that she had heard on the radio about some percentage of the children in this country bein raised by their grandparents. I forget what it was. Pretty high, I thought. Parents wouldnt raise em. We talked about that. What we thought was that when the next generation come along and they dont want to raise their children neither then who is goin to do it? Their own parents will be the only grandparents around and they wouldnt even raise them.

He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said, if he's not the word of God, God never spoke.

If I could plan my life I wouldnt want to live it.

Perhaps they had come to warn him. But of what? That he couldn't enkindle in the boy's heart what was ashes in his own?

There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.

Der Schatten des Jungen strich über ihn. Mit einem Bündel Holz in den Armen. Er sah ihm zu, wie er die Flammen anfachte. Gottes Feuerdrache. Funken stoben auf und erstarben im sternenlosen Dunkel. Nicht alle letzten Worte sind wahr, und diese Wohltat ist, obwohl ihres Bodens beraubt, nicht weniger real.