Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

This is what Great Art does. It becomes more real than the real, more true than the truth.

I suppose the suspicion is that our common past can only warrant a common future if we are willing to rid ourselves of the outliers.

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.

Did you learn to whisper in a saw mill?

and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For

What seems inconsequential to us by reason of usage is in fact the founding notion of civilization. Language, art, mathematics, everything. Ultimately the world itself and all in it.

The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

offered him her throat. In his rage he seized her up by the arm but the arm broke in his hand. A muted snap, like a dry stick. She gasped and cried out with the pain. Mira, he shouted. Mira, puta, que has hecho.

Hack away... the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Glannon to the thrapple.

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on somethin that was eatin you. Yessir.

while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out.

Sus orígenes son ya tan remotos como remoto es su destino y nunca más, por más vueltas que dé el mundo, encontrará territorios tan agrestes y bárbaros donde probar si la materia de la creación puede amoldarse a la voluntad humana o si el corazón no es más que arcilla de otra clase.

He was shot in a fracas of some kind. Long fore he married. Come near dyin. So I always wondered about that, had he died none of us would never have been at all and I never could … Well, that's a funny thing to think. Maybe we would have just been somebody else.

Most people don't ever see anyone die. It used to be if you grew up in a family you saw everybody die. They died in their bed at home with everyone gathered around. Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.

John Grady rode through the willows and down the arroyo following the occasional bare footprint in the rain spotted loam until he came upon Blevins crouched under the roots of a dead cottonwood in a caveout where the arroyo turned and fanned out onto the plain. He was naked save for an outsized pair of stained undershorts. What the hell are you doin? said John Grady. Blevins sat gripping his thin white shoulders in either hand. Just settin here, he said.

Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not to.

The secret truth: in this world the mask is what is true.

Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.

They silently agreed on two things. That God put horses on earth to work cattle and aside from cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.

If the world has a mind then it's all worse than we thought.

A week later I went on R and R and three weeks after that I was back in an AC-130 all strapped in and ready to die all over again.

On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination allotted them by the chance drop of a seed.

The highballs are on me. As the giraffe said to the bartender.

I don't know what to tell you, he wrote. Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I'm writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means.