Cormac McCarthy Quotes

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

I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or lo...

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that t...

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civiliza...

Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I shou...

The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a...

I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamour and d...

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing.

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sl...

In the grueling light that passed for day...

in that cold autistic dark.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the ambe...

When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too...

If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.

Do you think I lie to you?No.But you think I might lie to you about dying.Yes.Okay. I might. But we'...

His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sl...

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.I don't guess you would know it. You'd...

What is it?Nothing. I had a bad dream.What did you dream about?Nothing.Are you okay?No.He put his ar...

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes ...

Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?

In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on the slope...

Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turne...

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curs...

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them th...

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the wo...

What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream wou...

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and n...

The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint patter...

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to t...

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the wo...

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting rea...

Then don't. I can't help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of ...

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in p...

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Carry the fire.

You have my whole heart. You always did. You're the best guy. You always were.

Where men can't live gods fare no better.

Just take me with you. Please.I cant.Please, Papa.I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thou...

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is ...

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curs...

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as...

...the space which [books] occupied was itself an expectation.

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the wo...

By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drov...

Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and...

He rose and stood tottering in that cold dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibula...

If only my heart were stone.

In a pocket of his knapsack he'd found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy and t...

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turne...

Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

You have my whole heart. You always did.

They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a shi...

There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also whi...

All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various ti...

Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot...

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall ...

No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?No. It's never like what you expected.Qui...

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most a...

The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never hav...

the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. D...

If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall...

He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that peop...

For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all bu...

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and colo...

He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That i...

Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something ...

They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a...

The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, n...

Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in ...

Used to be a hobo right smart. back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could d...

In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility...

Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. ...

What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more th...

I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's t...

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the v...

When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on wha...

His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his ...

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

Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people ...

Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone.She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but wha...

Live by yourself and you bound to talk yourself and when ye commence that folks start it up that you...

It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gib...

I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.

Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I...

I aint sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you...

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.

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 som...

I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and ba...

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was abo...

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just brin...