Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

He saw a tourist drunk laboring up the sidewalk carrying a full suit of armor. He saw a beautiful young woman vomit in the street. Dogs turned at the sound and ran toward her.

Lo que es verdad de un hombre, dijo el juez, es verdad de muchos.

If you stretched a piece of music—so to speak—as the tone drew away the color would fade.

Let's hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery...

Suttree reached across the little space and took his uncle's willowing hands and composed them. I dont blame you, he said. I just want to tell you how some people are. I know how people are. I should know. Why should you? You think my father and his kind are a race apart. You can laugh at their pretensions, but you never question their right to the way of life they maintain.

Eine Katastrophe kann durch noch so viel Gutes nicht ausgelöscht werden. Sondern nur durch eine noch schlimmere Katastrophe.

You think that when there's somethin that's got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It's waitin for you. It always will be.

The rage of children seemed inexplicable other than as a breach of some deep and innate covenant having to do with how the world should be and wasnt.

He about deadcentered your pocketbook didnt he? Yeah, said Rawlins. He lifted up his glass and they drank. Rawlins stood thoughtfully. I dont know what that shit is, he said. But it tastes pretty good to a cowboy. Let us have three more here.

We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night. But as darkness descends does it matter?

I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all.

The trees were all encased in ice, limbless-looking where their black trunks rose in aureoles of lace, bright seafans shimmering in the wind and tinkling with an endless bell-like sound, a carillon in miniature, and glittering shards of ice falling in sporadic hail everywhere through the woods and marking the snow with incomprehensible runes.

The drought didnt know when the last one was and nobody knew when the next one was coming.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

Suttree stalked off to find the boy. I just come from there, the boy said. Well get your ass up cause you're going again. They aint no need to cuss about it, the boy said. It Sunday and all.

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

It has no reference to anything other than itself. You can name the notes with the letters of the alphabet if you like but it doesnt change anything. Oddly, they are not abstractions. Is music as we know it complete? In what sense? Are there classes such as major and minor we've yet to discover?

You're a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go.

The void has no stake in the world's continuing existence. It's home as well to countless millions of meteorites. Some of them enormous. Trundling across the blackness at forty miles a second. I think if there were anything to care it would have cared by now.

Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him

And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys. X

Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they'd never imagined.

He took of his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.

He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.