Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Well. Nothin's forever. Some things are. Yeah. Some things are.

How about this: What's black and white and red all over? I cant begin to think. Trotsky in a tuxedo. Great. Okay. How about this one. A farmer finds two boll weevils in his cotton patch. You told me. I never. He chose the lesser of two weevils.

The streetlamps stood in globes of vapor and the buildings were dark and sweating. At times the city seemed older than Nineveh.

You couldnt have understood what they were talking about. What I understood was that I had to learn what it was that they were talking about.

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

You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

que somos las víctimas del tiempo. En realidad la vía del mundo no es fijada en ningún lugar. Cómo sería posible? Nosotros mismos somos nuestra propia jornada. Y por eso somos el tiempo también. Somos lo mismo. Fugitivo. Inescrutable. Desapiadado.

Why are you by yourself? I'm not by myself. I'm schizophrenic.

Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth's crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth's wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.

What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations. That the man knows not how to even name that which enslaves him hardly lightens his burden.

he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.

Overseen all day by a goldtoothed pervert who carried a plaited rawhide quirt and harried them down the gutters on their knees gathering up the filth.

All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both. He'd often heard men say as much. All the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught, said the black.

You always did think the worst. And was seldom disappointed.

They listened with great attention as John Grady answered their questions and they nodded solemnly and they were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.

There was nothing to set a man's mind at ease like waking up in the morning and not having to decide who you were.

I'm goin to tell you right now, cousin. This is a heathenish bunch.

Oh, ever once in a while I'll catch myself slippin into manual override. But I catch myself. I catch myself.

But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.

You know my sister married a boy from Winston-Salem. And I thought to myself: I really need to get out of this town.

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. And by true I do not mean what is righteous but

The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People