Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sand-bags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.

Would it have done any good? No sir. But that dont make it right.

What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

How do you know that the call of the cole tit from the bracken is not really the lamentations of the damned? The world's a deceptive place. A lot of things that you see are not really there anymore. Just the after-image in the eye. So to speak.

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

Christ in a crinoline!

every act which has no heart will be found out in the end. Every gesture.

The truth of the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth nd thereby bled it of it's strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning

They used to pester me about gettin married again and I was near sixty when my wife died. My sister in law primarily. I'd done already had the best woman ever was. Aint nobody goin to be that lucky twice runnin.

Vous ne me laisserez pas plaider ma cause. Je connais votre cause. Votre cause c'est qu'il s'est passé certaines choses sur lesquelles vous n'avez aucun pouvoir. C'est vrai. Je suis certaine que c'est vrai. Mais ça ne fait pas une cause. Je n'ai pas de sympathie pour les gens auxquels des choses arrivent. C'est peut-être la malchance, mais est-ce que cela doit compter en leur faveur ?

and the filthy hides of which they'd divested themselves smoked and stank and blackened in the flames and the red sparks rose like the souls of the small life they'd harbored.

He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic blood. A child of God much like yourself perhaps.

The truth of the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of it's strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning

And I said no ma'am I just aim to quit. I ain't ahead by a damn sight. I never will be.

You didnt slack up on him just the littlest bit? No. I dont believe in it.

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be. The

Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you've not already given?

Nothing is changed. I wish it were a dream and I could wake. I wish I could forget it but I cant. I wish I could be who I was before but I never will be.

Hooknosed crones strapped into the electric chair. No one has ever seemed to comment that the stereotypical witch is meant to appear Jewish.

The mountains to the south stood blackly against a violet sky. The snow on the north slopes so pale. Like spaces left for messages.

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it. You understand what I'm sayin?

The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said

That old she-painter, she never left a track one. She wadn't no common kind of painter.

Stella Maris Black River Falls, Wisconsin Established 1902 Since 1950 a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric medical patients.