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Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes

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Famous Cormac McCarthy Quotes

“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.”

IfsWorldHeartWaterSilenceAirWindListeningColdMy HeartLateStonesBreathsLaysWoodsVoidAshesTremblingBleakBedrock
Book:The Road
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“If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?”

IfsKnowsWorldShouldMayDreamMightLyingCoursesCausesVisionBoundsGods WillPermitDreamerVeilsHeadingsPierceSorceryWrenches
Book:The Border Trilogy: Picador Classic
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“A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.”

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Author:Cormac McCarthy
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“and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.”

IfsWorldMomentsHandsCareYoungNamesDarkPoorStruggleRichBlessSteadyPaleRushingRich Or Poor
Book:The Border Trilogy
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“For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.”

MenWorldLooksShowsHandsTurnsNationsMy OwnBehindsSawsViolenceMadnessEndlessRuinsGreat MenStringsCurtainsMy Own LifePuppetsAll The Pretty HorsesPuppet Shows
Book:The Border Trilogy: Picador Classic
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“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.”

WorldHeartMightPainSecretVisionBloodFlowerTerribleCostBeatsMovedMultitudesEquityDeficitHeart BeatBeauty Of The WorldAll The Pretty Horses
Book:The Border Trilogy
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“They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”

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Book:All the Pretty Horses
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“Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”

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Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”

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Book:Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
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“He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.”

MenWorldWayYearsLittlesSaidTwoTogetherLastsPastNightMemoriesGoes OnDrinkMetsDancingExceptionUncertain
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

MenWorldWayMindFactsOrderUniverseLosesExistenceCreationThis WorldRepeatsStringsConceptionCompassMazesLatitude
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”

IfsMenWorldHeartMysteryColorCreaturesLimitsBoundsHorribleAliensBeastWildernessAlienation
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”

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Book:The Road
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“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”

MenWorldWayBelieveOrderFearTermDecisionSecretForeverTakenFateMysteryEffectsRainTasksDeedsDragSuperstitionsThreadTapestryErodeTaking Charge
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”

MenWorldMayLittlesMadeSaidSeemsEarthLastsDarkExistenceKnowingRocksCreationCreaturesForestsNakedSmallestEntityConsentCrumbs
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.”

MenWorldMadeSoulPurposeOrderKnownBloodWindWasteMonstersRegionsMapsImperativesDiscrete
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.”

WorldMomentsCareEarthFallSpaceBrainFireBloodPlanetsIllusionBlueGreenMovedLaysIncrediblesWoodsBonesCoreFallenDiscourseChamberFootstepsScarceOaksLovelinessWindyGiddyGravelVertigoCelts
Author:Cormac McCarthy
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“Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them”

IfsMenWorldMadeSaidHandsLyingNamesWishAnimalTreeBloodThis WorldSeriousWindDrinkBlowStormInvisibleTwistsCeremonySeriousness
Book:The Border Trilogy
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“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”

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Author:Cormac McCarthy
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“He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.”

WorldLongStarsDarkSleepDarknessSeaListeningMountainLong TimeBlueLaysBreathingDawnRisingDiamondHeelsBlanketSignaturesWildnessRising UpOrion
Book:All the Pretty Horses
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“By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.”

IfsWorldWayEyeFacesBlackDarkSkyFrontsWindStormEveningSmokeIronGrayLightningSparesFlawedTerrainSweatingSaddlesWelding
Book:The Border Trilogy: Picador Classic
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“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.”

ThinkingWorldLittlesDoeHas BeensEndsCountryDreamRealityLyingWishWaitingDealsKnownMy FamilyCuresFortunateSentimentsRuthlessDreams And Reality
Book:All the Pretty Horses
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“The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.”

IfsWorldEndsEarthPastCommonSunPureMoonMountainBirdBlueLaysRoseWestCaughtDawnPaleBoresBurnedReckoningReplica
Book:Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
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“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.”

IfsMenWorldNeedsOpinionSawsIdentityTruth IsEvery ManWitnessPriestsHeretic
Book:The Crossing: Book 2 of The Border Trilogy
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“Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.”

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Author:Cormac McCarthy
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“Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?”

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Book:The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form
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