Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

They aint got no medication for pilgrims waitin to take the Sunset?

He found Reese asleep in a wrecked car behind the cabins. Suttree shook him gently awake into a world he wanted no part of. The old man fought it.

Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name?

Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron fillings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality

But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other.

The work of an instant. The work of a lifetime.

He lay down in his blankets. It was growing dark, long late mid-summer twilight in the woods. He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad. He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm. My life is ghastly, he told the grass.

You have to right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.

People are interested in other people. But your unconscious is not. Or only as they might directly affect you. It's been hired to do a very specific job. It never sleeps. It's more faithful than God.

It's easier to remember two things than one. It's why it's easier to remember the words of a song than the words of a poem. For instance. The music is an armature upon which you assemble the words.

before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.

See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed & the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history & will have it.

Might does not make right, said Irving.

I dont think people are wrong to be concerned about the world's intentions toward them. There's a lot of bad news out there and some of it is coming to your house. Drowning

se sentó con las manos ahuecadas en el regazo y aparentemente satisfecho con el mundo, como si se le hubiera consultado a él en el momento de su creación.

there is no order in the world save that which death has put there.

But anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It's up there with fire and language. It's at least number three and it may be number one. We just dont know yet. But we will.

The girls emerged in their carboncopy dresses and the boy came out of the woods stiffly and looking churlish and sullen and strange, like a child pervert.

He said that fate might enter into the affairs of men in order to contravene them or set them at naught but to say that fate could deny the true and uphold the false would seem to be a contradictory view of things. To speak of a will in the world that ran counter to one's own was one thing. To speak of such a will that ran counter to the truth was quite another, for then all was rendered senseless.

He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.

cada hombre reside temporalmente en su prójimo y este en aquel y así sucesivamente en una infinita cadena de ser y de testigo hasta los más remotos confines del mundo.

Die Geschichte ist eine Sammlung von Papier. Ein paar verblassende Erinnerungen. Nach einer Weile ist das, was nicht geschrieben steht, nie geschehen.

I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects.

Some time after midnight on the twenty-first of December it began to snow. By morning in the gray spectral light of a brief and obscure winter sun the fields lay deadwhite and touched with a phosphorous glow as if producing illumination of themselves, and the snow was still wisping down thickly, veiling the trees beyond the creek and the mountain itself, falling softly, and softly, faintly sounding in the immense white silence.