Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

They motored out past the pilings, dark with pitch and trailing a green scurf in the claycolored water.

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

They ate on in silence, jaws working all down the table with great sobriety, all sitting upright and formal saving the toothless old woman who bent nearsightedly into her plate with smacking gums, a sparse tuft of long white chin hairs wagging and drifting above the food.

Well, I'll tell ye, they ain't no more heroes.

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so.

It's not so much that I don't believe in it. I don't subscribe to its nomination. If fate is the law then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility.

We're all of us pretty much an assemblage of memories.

If there is an afterlife - and I pray most fervently that there is not - I can only hope that they wont sing.

Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

I'm not sure what the adaptive advantage could be to share an innate and collective misery.

If we should meet again I hope there will be something in the way of a wateringhole where I can stand you a round. Perhaps show you about the place. Look for a tall and somewhat raffish looking chap in a tailored robe.

You ever think what it would be like to meet a person you've known for a long time for the first time in these later years? To meet them anew. You're thinking they would be a much different person to you if you didn't know their history.

For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry.

I can only assume that fresh demons have materialized out of your troubled karma.

The old man opened his hands and closed them again. A gesture of accommodation. Not quite a blessing. He nodded toward the glass case where half a dozen old Colt revolvers lay displayed, some nickelplated, some with grips of staghorn. One with old worn grips of guttapercha, one with the front sight filed away. All of them belonged to somebody's grandfather, he said.

it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

Odd the way the world is. How you can have just about anything except what you want.

My railings against the platonists are a thing of the past. Assuming at last that one could, what would be the advantage of ignoring the transcendent nature of mathematical truths. There is nothing else that all men are compelled to agree upon, and when the last light in the last eye fades to black and takes all speculation with it forever I think it could even be that these truths will glow for just a moment in the final light. Before the dark and the cold claim everything.

I've studied much and learned little.

Night fell long and cool through the woods about him and a spectral quietude set in. As if something were about that crickets and nightbirds held in dread.

a fast car and an open road can give you a sensation that's hard to duplicate elsewhere or otherwise.

He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.

She wanted to disappear. Well, that's not quite right. She wanted not to have ever been here in the first place.