Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

So if you get the impression from time to time that we're sort of winging it here so be it. The first thing is to locate the narrative line. It doesnt have to hold up in court. Start splicing in your episodics. Your anecdotals. You'll figure it out. Just remember that where there's no linear there's no delineation. Try

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs

What is wrong with story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.

If fate is the law then is fate also subject to that law?

Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.

I did want to be included. I just wasn't willing to pay the entry fee. On my better days I could even grant that we were the same creatures. Much was the same and little different. The same unlikely forms. Elbows. Skulls. The remnants of a soul.

At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It's in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.

This is the house where the dead lived. It is gone, lost and gone.

You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

the woman stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.

And she says you cant change history and that ruins should be left to ruin. And she's right. But that the craft of stonemasonry should be allowed to vanish from this world is just not negotiable for me. Somewhere there is someone who wants to know. Nor will I have to seek him out. He'll find me.

They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds. They

The uncle narrowed his eyes at Suttree. No need to get on your high horse with me, he said. At least I was never in the goddamned penitentiary. Suttree smiled. The workhouse, John. It's a little different. But I am what I am.

Not sure why. But you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

Papa mole comes along tunneling under the garden and he sniffs and he says: I smell rutabagas. And Mama mole comes along behind him and she sniffs and she says: I smell turnips. And Baby mole comes along and sniffs and what does Baby mole say he smells? He say he dont smell nothin but molasses. They

For we are all the elect, each one of us, and we are embarked upon a journey to something unimaginable. We do not know what will be required of us, and we have nothing to sustain us but the counsel of our fathers.

The drunk's concern ain't that he's goin to die from drinkin - which he is. It's that he's goin to run out of whiskey fore he gets a chance to do it.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

And that would be my life. And I would be happy.

after a while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that it may well have been so. But certainly the wise high God in his dismay at the proliferation of lunacy on this earth must have wetted a thumb and leaned down out of the abyss and pinched it hissing into extinction.

Suttree eased himself down on the arm of the sofa and sipped his beer. He patted J-Bone on the back. The voices seemed to fade. He waved away the whiskeybottle with a smile. In this tall room, the cracked plaster sootstreaked with the shapes of laths beneath, this barrenness, this fellowship of the doomed. Where life pulsed obscenely fecund. in the drift of voices and the laughter and the reek of stale beer the Sunday loneliness seeped away.

Man dont always catch what he fishes for.

They have a long life, dreams. I have dreams now which I had as a young girl. They have an odd durability for something not quite real. Do you think they mean anything? She looked surprised. Oh yes, she said. Dont you? Well. I dont know. They're in your head. She smiled again. I suppose I dont consider that to be the condemnation you do.

Pues la existencia tiene su propio orden y eso no puede comprenderlo ninguna inteligencia humana, siendo que la propia inteligencia no es sino un hecho entre otros.