He knew that those things we most desire to hold in our hearts are often taken from us while that which we would put away seems often by that very wish to become endowed with unsuspected powers of endurance. He knew how frail is the memory of loved ones. How we close our eyes and speak to them. How we long to hear their voices once again, and how those voices and those memories grow faint and faint until what was flesh and blood is no more than echo and shadow. In the end perhaps not even that.

— Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes

The wolf is made he 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

Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

— Cormac McCarthy

Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality.

— Cormac McCarthy

If you sincerely want to hear all about what is wrong with you and what you ought to do to rectify it all you need to do is let them inlaws on the place. You’ll get a complete rundown on the subject and I guarantee it. She.

— Cormac McCarthy

Everything is painful to me. I think. Maybe I’m just a painful person.

— Cormac McCarthy

When her aunt Helen came to visit she asked the girl what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said dead.

— Cormac McCarthy

You said that the Manhattan Project was a major historical event. Is it possible to see it with any sort of perspective? We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war. Yes. Well, it’s probably like any bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be.

— Cormac McCarthy

Nothing’s forever. It wasnt the sort of news that a cat likes to hear.

— Cormac McCarthy

They did not smell like horses. They smelled like what they were, wild animals. He held the horse’s face against his chest and he could feel along his inner thighs the blood pumping through the arteries and he could smell the fear and he cupped his hand over the horse’s eyes and stroked them and he did not stop talking to the horse at all, speaking in a low steady voice and telling it all that he intended to do and cupping the animal’s eyes and stroking the terror out.

— Cormac McCarthy

She said that femininity encoded mandates that were far less forgiving than anything men were familiar with.

— Cormac McCarthy

The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy. I suppose that’s true. What then? Is that all that the world has in mind? If the world has a mind then it’s all worse than we thought.

— Cormac McCarthy

Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.

— Cormac McCarthy

The darker picture is always the correct one. When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore. And yet we imagine that the future will somehow be different. I’ve no idea why we are even still here but in all probability we will not be here much longer.

— Cormac McCarthy

That’s where you’re wrong my friend. Everything’s important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important. Whether he’s a small town county sheriff or the president. Or a busted out bum. You might even understand that some day.

— Cormac McCarthy

They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

— Cormac McCarthy

The best way to die well is to live well. To die for another would give your death meaning. Ignoring for the time being the fact that the other is going to die anyway.

— Cormac McCarthy

Bright people often have a good load to carry. But boredom is seldom a part of it. It’s all right. I’m always pleased to see just that small bit deeper. You deny our brotherhood. Insisting as you do in your sly way that our genealogies and our socioeconomic standings have set us apart at birth in a manner not to be contravened. But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

— Cormac McCarthy

It may even be that everybody starts out fairly unique only most people get over it. Come.

— Cormac McCarthy

Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it? What the hell’s wrong with you?

— Cormac McCarthy

I inherited him from my grandfather. My family had a carnival. He was one of the acts. My grandfather died and the parrot hasnt spoken since. Sort of like my grandfather’s clock.

— Cormac McCarthy
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