Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it’s true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. it has no reference to anything other than itself.

— Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes

The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities. In their minds. They pretend to themselves that they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. And it is always one’s stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one’s enemies. Or discourages it.

— Cormac McCarthy

What’s your daughter’s name? Rachel. Lovely name. A sad name. How old is she? She’s nine. What’s she like?’ She’s not sad. Not yet.

— Cormac McCarthy

You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

— Cormac McCarthy

But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.

— Cormac McCarthy

I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all. And by true I do not mean what is righteous but.

— Cormac McCarthy

She came down the steps slowly, madonna bereaved, so griefstunned and wooden pieta of perpetual dawn, the birds were hushed in the presence of this gravity and the derelict that she had taken for the son of light himself was consumed in shame like a torch.

— Cormac McCarthy

The old lamps down Chartres Street like burning gauze in the fog.

— Cormac McCarthy

To the skeptic all arguments are circular.

— Cormac McCarthy

What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God – who knows all that can be known – seems powerless to change.

— Cormac McCarthy

The mother cried out and sank to the ground and was lifted up and helped away wailing. Stabat Mater Dolorosa. Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.

— Cormac McCarthy

When smart people do dumb things it’s usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear. They want something they’re not supposed to have or they’ve done something they weren’t supposed to do. In either case they’ve usually fasten on to a set of beliefs that are supportive of their state of mind but at odds with reality. It has become more important for them to believe that to know.

— Cormac McCarthy

The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.

— Cormac McCarthy

Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.

— Cormac McCarthy

Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.

— Cormac McCarthy

Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.

— Cormac McCarthy

So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

— Cormac McCarthy

Even if all news of the world was a lie it would not then follow that there is some counterfactual truth for it to be a lie about.

— Cormac McCarthy

Who tells it so? Could a whole man not author his own death with a tought? Shut down the ventricle like the closing of an eye?

— Cormac McCarthy

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.

— Cormac McCarthy

I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

— Cormac McCarthy
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