Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you're not. Not yet. And now, good night.

You're a formidable riddler and I'll not match words with ye

Did I kill a lot of people? I been asked that question a few times. But never before by a man. I told this one girl I was seeing that yes I had killed a bunch of gooks but that I hadnt eaten any of them.

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.

Do reflections also travel at the speed of light? What does your buddy Albert think? When the light hits the glass and starts back in the opposite direction doesnt it have to come to a full stop first? And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark. What's

There's no way to answer that question. My friend John maintains that if things are going reasonably well it's all your own doing and if not then it's all bad luck.

For the world was made new each day and it was only men's clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more.

Suffering is part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.

What I found that surprised me was the unbalanced enjoy a certain largesse of personal freedom increasingly abridged in the workaday world.

if things are going reasonably well it's all your own doing and if not then it's all bad luck.

White Was he killed? Black I hope so. We buried him.

War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.

The roar of the pistol in his face chopped it off and the size of the silence that followed was enormous.

A halfman on a skatecart oared past with leather chocks.

The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of the pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression.

De todos modos el compartir es la ley del camino, verdad?

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning.

when you close your eyes do I go away? Do you?

We could choose to join the beliefs and practices of the millions of dead beneath our feet or we could begin again. Did he really have to think about it? Why should I have no one? Why should he? I told him that I'd no way even to know if there was justice in my heart if I had no one to love and love me. You cannot credit yourself with a truth that has no resonance. Where is the reflection of your worth? And who will speak for you when you are dead?

It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong.

I didnt know you were a bird watcher. I'm not. I'm a forever watcher.

The world's truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.

evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure.

Gentlemen, he said, we dont mind servin people of color. Glad to do it. But we ast for em to set over here at this other table here. Right over here.