Cormac McCarthy Quotes & Sayings

I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late. — Cormac McCarthy

If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it. — Cormac McCarthy

Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything. — Cormac McCarthy

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion. — Cormac McCarthy

Satan hath power to assume a pleasing form. Them big blue eyes. Knew more ways to turn a man's head than the devil's grandmother. I dont know where they learn it at. Hell, she wasnt but seventeen. — Cormac McCarthy

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else. — Cormac McCarthy

He..said..in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man's flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, night-soil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which? — Cormac McCarthy

That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. — Cormac McCarthy

Ah me, thou Destiny, Giver of evil gifts. — Cormac McCarthy

The tensile properties of this unratified truce were abused to the utmost of their enduring when the judge stood slightly in the saddle and raised his arm and spoke out a greeting beyond them. — Cormac McCarthy

I couldn't trust you with it. To do something with it. I don't want anybody talking about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean, you could talk about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody. I think in times like these the less said the better. If something had happened and we were survivors and we met on the road then we'd have something to talk about. But we're not. So we don't. — Cormac McCarthy

He'd stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. — Cormac McCarthy

Betty, he said. Yes. I'm not what you think I am. I aint nothin. I dont know why you put up with me. Well, Mr Parham, I know who you are. And I do know why. You go to sleep now. I'll see you in the morning. Yes mam. — Cormac McCarthy

His head was pounding and his vision skewed in some way and he was vaguely amazed at being alive and not sure that it was worth it. — Cormac McCarthy

What joins men together ... is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. — Cormac McCarthy

He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing. — Cormac McCarthy

She looks like her face caught fire and they beat it out with a rake — Cormac McCarthy

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground. — Cormac McCarthy

Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping. — Cormac McCarthy

Son, not everbody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven. — Cormac McCarthy

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. — Cormac McCarthy

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. — Cormac McCarthy

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all. — Cormac McCarthy

You told me once you believed in God. The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could. What would you say to him? Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: What's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together. Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say? The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer. — Cormac McCarthy

The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin. — Cormac McCarthy

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. — Cormac McCarthy

Females of domestic reputation lounged upon the balconies they passed with faces gotten up in indigo and almagre gaudy as the rumps of apes and they peered from behind their fans with a kind of lurid coyness like transvestites in a madhouse. — Cormac McCarthy

It is always one's stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one's enemies. Or discourages it. — Cormac McCarthy

In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his story through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to beat upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. — Cormac McCarthy

Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering. — Cormac McCarthy

There are other good guys. You said so. Yes.
So where are they? They're hiding. Who are they hiding from? From each other. — Cormac McCarthy

Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now — Cormac McCarthy

The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. — Cormac McCarthy

We'll just take it one step at a time.
Okay.
Don't let go.
Okay.
No matter what.
No matter what. — Cormac McCarthy

They wont ride at night, said Brown. The recruit looked back at the figures gathered about the keg in that scoured and darkening waste. Why wont they? he said. Brown spat. Because it's dark, he said. — Cormac McCarthy

He slept and in his sleep he saw his friends again and they were coming downriver on muddy floodwaters, Hoghead and the City Mouse and J-Bone and Bearhunter and Bucket and Boneyard and J D Davis and Earl Solomon, all watching him where he stood on the shore. They turned gently in their rubber bullboat, bobbing slightly on the broad and ropy waters, their feet impinging in the floor of the thing with membraneous yellow tracks. They glided past somberly. Out of a lightless dawn receding, past the pale daystar. A fog more obscure closed away their figures gone a sadder way by psychic seas across the Tarn of Acheron. From a rock in the river he waved them farewell but they did not wave back. — Cormac McCarthy

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. — Cormac McCarthy

He said if he is not the word of God God never spoke (4) — Cormac McCarthy

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992] — Cormac McCarthy

Last words are only words. — Cormac McCarthy

I'm double bred for death by fire. — Cormac McCarthy

They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly. — Cormac McCarthy

The sand where he sat was warm to the touch but the night beyond the fire was sharp with the cold. He got up and dragged fresh wood in under the bridge. He stood listening. The boy didnt stir. He sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god. Please dont tell me how the story ends. — Cormac McCarthy

Men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent's flesh for its bite. — Cormac McCarthy

They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddle legged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the grey twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. — Cormac McCarthy

Maybe hope springs eternal in the whale's heart too. I don't know. If you look at the history of species there seems to be no selective advantage to intelligence. It's the microbes who have totally ignored selection for three and a half billion years that remain with us and probably will remain. They seem almost immortal. The process of evolution appears to be about specialization and adaptation and yet these are the very things that seem ultimately to mediate against survival itself. — Cormac McCarthy

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. — Cormac McCarthy

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you. — Cormac McCarthy

Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. — Cormac McCarthy

The uncle lit up and blew smoke in a thin blue viper's breath toward the window. It coiled and diffused in the yellow light. He smiled. I'd like to have a dollar for every time I quit, he said. — Cormac McCarthy

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there. — Cormac McCarthy

The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit. — Cormac McCarthy

He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all. — Cormac McCarthy

Stark gray world appeared again and again out of the night in the shrouded flare of the lightning. — Cormac McCarthy

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. — Cormac McCarthy

My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you're sorry and get on with it. Don't haul stuff around with you. — Cormac McCarthy

Ten thousand dreams ensepulchered within their crozzled hearts. — Cormac McCarthy

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. — Cormac McCarthy

Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones. — Cormac McCarthy

There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us. — Cormac McCarthy

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you. — Cormac McCarthy

They rode back, Rawlins leading the riderless horse by the bridlereins. Blevins was sitting in the middle of the road. He still had his hat on. Whoo, he said when he saw them. I'm drunkern shit. They sat their horses and looked down at him. Can you ride or not? said Rawlins. Does a bear shit in the woods? Hell yes I can ride. I was ridin when I fell off. He stood uncertainly and peered about. — Cormac McCarthy

There aint no virtue in quittin what you aint able any longer to do in the first place. — Cormac McCarthy

You dont get your black ass away from this fire I'll kill you graveyard dead. He looked to where Glanton sat. Glanton watched him. He put the pipe in his mouth and rose and took up the apishamore and folded it over his arm. Is that your final say? Final as the judgement of God. The black looked once more across the flames at Glanton and then he moved away in the dark. The white man uncocked the revolver and placed it on the ground before him. Two of the others came back to the fire and stood uneasily. Jackson sat with his legs crossed. One hand lay in his lap and the other was outstretched on his knee holding a slender black cigarillo. The nearest man to him was Tobin and when the black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowieknife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony Tobin started to rise. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. — Cormac McCarthy

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. — Cormac McCarthy

The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. — Cormac McCarthy

Dwindling slowly on the road behind him like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever. — Cormac McCarthy

The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him. The smell of coalsmoke in the air at night. Old times, dead years. For him such memories are bitter ones. — Cormac McCarthy

White pussy is nothin but trouble. — Cormac McCarthy

The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings. — Cormac McCarthy

Buddy when he come back from up in the panhandle told me one time it quit blowin up there and all the chickens fell over. — Cormac McCarthy

In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent. — Cormac McCarthy

They camped that night on the foreplain at the foot of a talus slope and the murder that had been reckoned upon took place. — Cormac McCarthy

He sounded like a man with a mouthful of marbles, articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away. — Cormac McCarthy

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. — Cormac McCarthy

They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey. — Cormac McCarthy

The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. How could there be? At whose behest? This man did not cease to believe in God. Nor did he come to have some modern view of God. There was God and there was the world. He knew that the world would forget him but that God could not. And yet that was the very thing he wished for. — Cormac McCarthy

You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn't. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didn't know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn't mine. It never has been. — Cormac McCarthy

Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether. He listened. Above the black ranks of trees the mid-summer sky arched cloudless and coldly starred. He lay back and stared at it and after a while he slept. — Cormac McCarthy

God speaks in the least of creatures. — Cormac McCarthy

Glass flowers exploding. Slow trail of colors down the sky like stains dispersing in the sea, candescent polyps extinguished in the depths. — Cormac McCarthy

He had no faith in the power of men to act wisely in their own behalf. It was his view rather that every act soon eluded the grasp of its propagator to be swept away in a clamorous tide of unforeseen consequence. He believed that in the world was another agenda, another order, and with this power lay whatever brief he may have held. In the meantime he waited to be called to he knew not what. — Cormac McCarthy

If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You
cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only. — Cormac McCarthy

Choose your enemies carefully 'cause they will define you Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends Gonna last with you longer than your friend — Cormac McCarthy

It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight ... — Cormac McCarthy

The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. — Cormac McCarthy

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now. — Cormac McCarthy

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire. — Cormac McCarthy

The point is there ain't no point. — Cormac McCarthy

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. — Cormac McCarthy

When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen. — Cormac McCarthy

Call it, friend-O" (No Country For Old Men) — Cormac McCarthy

What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle. — Cormac McCarthy

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. — Cormac McCarthy

You wont man that son of a bitch, said Brown. I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky. — Cormac McCarthy

There was no wind and the silence out there was greatly favored by every kind of fugitive as was the open country itself and no mountains close at hand for enemies to black themselves against. — Cormac McCarthy

This other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end. — Cormac McCarthy

He had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance. — Cormac McCarthy

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing. — Cormac McCarthy

All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That's your notion.
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. — Cormac McCarthy