Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

I'm a fugitive from the ways of this world. I'd be a fugitive from my mind if I had me some snow.

Shoo, said the old man. I wouldn't turn Satan away for a drink.

You know what a blivet is? What. A blivet is ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack.

I know that you can make a good case that all of human sorrow is grounded in injustice. Ands sorrow is what is left when rage is expended and found to be impotent.

He stood watching them for a long time. They all seemed to be waiting for something. Like passengers in a halted train. Yet the captain inhabited another space and it was a space of his own election and outside the common world of men. A space privileged to men of the irreclaimable act which while it contained all lesser worlds within it contained no access to them. For the terms of election were of a piece with its office and once chosen that world could not be quit.

The boy looked at him. Finally he asked him why this was such a blessing and the blind man did not answer and did not answer and then at last he said that because what can be touched falls into dust there can be no mistaking these things for the real. At best they are only tracings of where the real has been.

Es un gran misterio. El hombre no puede conocer su mente porque la mente es el único medio de que dispone para conocerla. Puede conocer su corazón, pero no quiere. Y hace bien. Es mejor no mirar ahí dentro. No es el corazón de una criatura que siga el camino que Dios le ha marcado. Se puede encontrar maldad hasta en el más pequeño de los animales, pero cuando Dios creó al hombre el diablo estaba a su lado. Una

Nothing moved in that purgatorial waste save carnivorous birds. By

And she said that since this was so nor could it be altered one was better to follow one's heart in joy and in misery than simply to seek comfort for there was none. To seek it was only to welcome in the misery and to know little else. She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.

Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He

Books lie, he said. God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

The cranes were moving south and he watched their thin echelons trail along those unseen corridors writ in their blood a hundred thousand years.

People dont feel safe no more, he said. We're like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We dont know what's goin to show up here come daylight. We dont even know what color they'll be.

if mathematics is performed mostly in the unconscious we still have no notion as to how it goes about it. ... And why is it so often right? Who does it check its work with? I've had solutions simply handed to me. Out of the blue. The locus ceruleus perhaps. And it has to remember everything. No notes. It's hard to escape the unsettling conclusion that it is not using numbers.

Qualunque cosa esista, disse. Qualunque cosa esista nella creazione senza che io la conosca esiste senza il mio consenso.

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good the God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot

The slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them.

Do you think of yourself as an atheist. God no. Those were the good old days.

Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?

My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow.

Where he walked the tideline at dusk the last red reaches of the sun flared slowly out along the sky to the west and the tidepools stood like spills of blood.

Death is what the living carry with them.

They wheeled Suttree on. Bearing his pained bones in their boat of flesh. To where the deadcarriage waits in the dark. Perhaps the wrath of God after all.