Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

You listen to me, he said. Dont you let em think they aint goin to have to. You hear me? I intend to make em kill me. I wont take nothin less. They either got to kill us or let us be. There aint no middle ground.

He polished the underside of the messtray with the sleeve of his shift and standing in the center of the room under the lightbulb he studied the face that peered dimly out of the warped steel like some maimed and raging djinn enconjured there.

You never know when you'll be in need of them you've despised, said Blevins.

Harrogate grinned uneasily. They tried to get me for beast, beast … Bestiality? Yeah. But my lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast. He was a smart son of a bitch. Oh boy, said Suttree.

You cant have your ambient reality put askew without becoming somewhat askew yourself.

When you hear a sobbing child say it's not fair you are always hearing the truth.

It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.

He kept complaining about everything until they finally turned on him and asked him just what it was that he wanted. That seemed to stop him and he gave it some thought and finally he said that he just wanted to be happy. At which they turned on him all over again and said no no no, Leonard. Realistic goals.

El malpaís. Era un laberinto. Subías a toda prisa un pequeño promontorio y de repente te veías rodeado de grietas tan profundas que no te atrevías a saltarlas. Los bordes de cristal negro y puntiagudo y abajo puntiagudas rocas de sílex (...) Donde que nosotros sepamos está localizado el infierno

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

He might say that milk is the beverage of choice among all right-thinking nightfolk. Or he would say that if anything were true wouldnt everybody know it by now? Or that you shouldnt worry about what people think of you because they dont do it that often. Or that we are hardly creatures of the light in case you hadnt noticed. Or that the darkest hour is just before the storm. Or when you close your eyes do I go away? Do you?

But one's convictions as to the nature of reality must also represent one's limitations as to the perception of it. And then I just stopped worrying about it. I accepted the fact that I would die without really knowing where it was that I had been and that was okay. Well. Almost.

You think sometimes I dont listen. I think you listen. I'm not so sure what you hear.

Did you want her to kill herself? No. I wanted her to be free. Do you think that's freedom? Maybe not. But a fast car and an open road can give you a sensation that's hard to duplicate elsewhere or otherwise.

Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.

His father rode sitting forward slightly in the saddle, holding the reins in one hand about two inches above the saddlehorn. So thin and frail, lost in his clothes. 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.

Black: I see a different truth. Settin right across the table from me. White: Which is? Black: That you must love your brother or die.

You dont always get what you want. But then you dont always want what you get so it's probably pretty much of a wash.

I was a born classicist and my heroes were never saints but killers.

I know they was families got thowed off their farms back in the thirties by the TVA and come to Anderson County and got thowed off all over again. They was even families had been removed from their homesteads in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the thirties, TVA in the thirties again, and the atom bomb in the forties. By that time they didnt have nothin.

El secreto, he said, es que en este mundo la máscara es la que es verdadera

for what could be said to occur unobserved?

They was some of em wound up just livin in the woods like animals. And that was a cold winter, too. People would see em crossin the road at night in the carlights. Whole families. Carryin blankets. Pots and pans. People tried to find em. Take em some flour and meal. Coffee. Maybe a little sidemeat. I think about those children. I do yet.

But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way o show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet is all we have.