Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change.

Everything's important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important. Whether he's a small town county sheriff or the president. Or a busted out bum.

There was a paper bag on the night table that held things he'd

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his own doing.

And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.

Recurrences of dreams he'd had in the mountains came and went and the second night he woke from uneasy sleep and lay in the world alone.

Men spared their lives in great disasters often feel in their deliverance the workings of fate. The hand of Providence.

Whoo, he said when he saw them. I'm drunkern shit.

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 selection between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.

Am I a monster, are there monsters in me ?

I know that small acts of valor may be all that is visible of great movements of courage within.

Who would steal them? No idea. They didnt leave a note.

He had no faith in the power of men to act wisely in their own behalf. It was his view rather that every act soon eluded the grasp of its propagator to be swept away in a clamorous tide of unforeseen consequence. He believed that in the world was another agenda, another order, and with this power lay whatever faith he may have held. In the meantime he waited to be called to he knew not what.

In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.

In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased.

So where does music come from? No one knows. A platonic theory of music just muddies the water. Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it's true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language.

Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

We are like primitive tribes that have been driven from their culture and have lost their orientation, their identity, their capacity to live.

The man looked up wearily. You aint callin me a liar are ye son? I aint ye son. How old are you? That's some more of your business. How old are you? He's fifteen. You hush your damn mouth. He turned to the man. He dont speak for me, he said. He's done spoke. I was fifteen year old when I was first shot. I aint never been shot. You aint sixteen yet neither.

The house was built in 1872. Seventy-seven years later his grandfather was the first to die in it. What others had lain in state in that hallway had been carried there on a gate or wrapped in a wagonsheet or delivered crated up in a raw pineboard box with a teamster standing at the door with a bill of lading. The ones that came at all. For the most part they were dead by rumor. A yellowed scrap of newsprint. A letter. A telegram.

In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest — littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate livercolored gills — has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.

Those people would take you in and put you up and feed you and feed your horse and cry when you left.

These parched beasts had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather hanging from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them

If a psychosis was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static? But you dont. You get a carefully crafted and fairly articulate world never seen before. Who's doing this? Who is it who is running around hooking up the dangling wires in new and unusual ways. Why is he doing it? What is the algorithm he follows? Why do we suspect there is one?