Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

That's where you're wrong my friend. Everything's important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important. Whether he's a small town county sheriff or the president. Or a busted out bum. You might even understand that some day.

Across the yard, brilliant against the façade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten (135)

When the boy asked him if this knowledge were a special knowledge only to the blind the blind man said that it was not. He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had no time to sharpen them.

They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

The best way to die well is to live well. To die for another would give your death meaning. Ignoring for the time being the fact that the other is going to die anyway.

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.

It may even be that everybody starts out fairly unique only most people get over it. Come

Em qualquer acontecimento a história de todos não é a história de cada um nem tampouco a soma dessas histórias e ninguém aqui no final pode entender o motivo de sua presença pois ninguém tem como saber no que o acontecimento consiste. Na verdade, se a pessoa soubesse é bem provável que se ausentasse e como você pode ver isso não pode ser parte do plano se é que algum plano há.

He lay with his feet together and his arms at his sides like a dead king on an altar. He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth's cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.

The point, Squire, is that where they used to be confined to State institutions or to the mudrooms and attics of remote country houses they are now abroad everywhere. The government pays them to travel. To procreate, for that matter. I've seen entire families here that can best be explained as hallucinations. Hordes of drooling dolts lurching through the streets. Their inane gibbering. And of course no folly so deranged or pernicious as to escape their advocacy.

If they'd thought a bit more about biological evolution and spent less time cooking up nutty theories they might have uncovered a few simple truths.

They mounted, pistols in hand, saps of rawhide and riverrock looped about their wrists like the implements of some primitive equestrian game. Glanton looked back at them and then nudged forth his horse.

There's some things you dont decide. Decidin had nothin to do with it.

Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it? What the hell's wrong with you?

I inherited him from my grandfather. My family had a carnival. He was one of the acts. My grandfather died and the parrot hasnt spoken since. Sort of like my grandfather's clock.

A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound.

This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.

Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.

The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.

What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?

What's the bravest thing you ever did? He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

Books should always be open.

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else.