Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

He waited for many years to hear from God what it was that was expected of him. What he was to do with this life. But God never said.

I was a Mormon. Then I converted to the church. Then I became I dont know what. Then I became me.

La gente si lamenta sempre delle cose brutte che gli capitano senza che se le sia meritate ma non parla mai delle cose belle. Di cosa ha fatto per meritarle. Io non ricordo di aver mai dato a nostro Signore motivi particolari per sorridermi. Però lui mi ha sorriso.

Concentrated populations of the deranged assume certain powers. It has an unsettling effect. You spend some time in a nuthouse and you'll see.

The task of the narrator is not an easy one, he said. He appears to be required to choose his tale from among the many that are possible. But of course that is not the case. The case is rather to make many of the one.

For the most part they were dead by rumor. A yellowed scrap of newsprint. A letter. A telegram.

I know that to be female is an older thing even than to be human.

Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.

If something did not love you you would not be here.

Toadvine was four steps above him and when he kicked him he caught him in the throat.

They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard

Death is not a lover. Oh yes he is.

Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Its general vacuity aside there seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.

To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere

Hard people makes hard times. I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone away.

What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. But if I was your enemy with whom would you have shared me? With whom?

Is history about money?

Well. I guess what I understand is that at the core of the world of the deranged is the realization that there is another world and that they are not a part of it.

What. When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He though 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.

What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?

He said that far from making men reflective or wise it was his experience that death often leads them to attribute great consequence to trivial things.

People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you.