Cormac McCarthy quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Cormac McCarthy on Wise Famous Quotes.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

Tell us where the world went.

The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.

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

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

This is a dog. He is dead too. This

But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.

Do you think God knows what's happenin?
I expect he does.
You think he can stop it?
No. I dont.

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

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

Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.

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

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.

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

The spotlight kept rowing back and forth across the face of the ridge. Methodically. Bright shuttle, dark loom.

This night, thy soul may be required of thee.

I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it.

They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.

What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?

At our noblest we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.

Commend him gently, whom the wrath he suckled at his heart has wasted more than years.

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.

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.

Other than a light beading of sweat on his forehead there was little evidence that his labors had cost him anything at all.

He looked like he was studying something small in the grass.

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

Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?

Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.

They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I dont dream at all.

Do you think I lie to you?
No.
But you think I might lie to you about dying.
Yes.
Okay. I might. But we're not dying.
Okay.

A rich smell of woodsmoke hung over the road.

In a world darksome as this'n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most.

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 is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many.

They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart.

Ever is a long time.

He walked out on the beach to the edge of the light and stood with his clenched fists on top of his skull and fell to his knees sobbing in rage.

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.

Who is it? said the boy.
I dont know. Who is anybody?

Can't stop what's coming. Ain't no waiting on you. That's vanity.

If a man's at odds to know his own mind it's because he hasn't got aught but his mind to know it with.

If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.

I've no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favor? I

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

Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them.

He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.

There's a kind of man that when he cant have what he wants he wont take the next best thing but the worst he can find.

I dont know what happens to country.

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

How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood.

Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?

The faint light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot.

Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded.

The man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.

The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.

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

The child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past.

He may be dead; or he may be teaching English.

guess he said cattle could tell the difference between a flight of geese and a cat on fire. Maybe

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

Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch.

It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

People think they know what they want but they generally don't. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways.

I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it

Where man can't live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

For the most part they were dead by rumor. A yellowed scrap of newsprint. A letter. A telegram.

We none of us knew him to speak [Dutch]. Asked him where he'd learned it you know what he said?
What did he say.
Said off a Dutchman.

From thinking about your sweet face between my legs.

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

like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.

Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

When the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be their yet.

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.

Beware, gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.

Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.

He couldn't remember where he was. The thought made him smile

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.

There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.

whoever approaches his goal dances

He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought.

The trouble with a liar is he can't remember what he said.

They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Ultimo hombre. Last man standing, must've been one. Where'd he go?

His subtle obsession with uniqueness troubled all his dreams.

One thing about me, when I'm wrong I'll admit it. Well. That's a good trait to have.

Where'd you get that pistol?
At the gettin place

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

Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick.

There ain't but one life worth livin and I was born to it.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Do you have any notion of how goddamned crazy you are?