Cormac McCarthy Quotes

“You know that the things you put it your head stay there, right?'
'Yeah. But you remember some things, don't you?'
'Yeah. You remember the things you want to forget and forget the things you want to remember.”

Source: The Road

“you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.”

Source: The Road

“I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.”

Source: No Country for Old Men

“It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.”

Variant: Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
Source: All the Pretty Horses

“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.”

Source: All the Pretty Horses

“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.”

Source: The Road

Cormac McCarthy Quotes about the world

“Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.”

Source: The Road

“It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.”

Source: The Road

Cormac McCarthy The Sunset Limited

Source: The Sunset Limited

“Each the others world entire.”

“At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned”

Source: The Road

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God

“The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.”

“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.”

Source: All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy Quotes about men

“Where men can't live gods fare no better.”

Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.”

Source: The Road

“Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”

Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing…”

Source: All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

Source: The Crossing

“What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”

“It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. 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.”

Source: All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy: Trending quotes

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

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“God don't lie…. And these are his words…. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.”

Source: No Country for Old Men (2005)

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IX, Judge Holden

Cormac McCarthy Quotes

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

Source: The Road

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”

Source: All the Pretty Horses

“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.”

Source: The Road

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”

Source: The Road

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”

Source: The Road

“Whatever exists, he [the judge] said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”

Source: The Road

“He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.”

Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“He thought 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.”

All the Pretty Horses (1992)
Context: He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else.”

All the Pretty Horses (1992)
Context: He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought 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.

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

Source: No Country for Old Men (2005)
Context: You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?

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

Source: All the Pretty Horses

“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”

Source: The Road

“War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”

Source: The Road

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”

The judge
Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

Source: All the Pretty Horses

“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

Source: The Road

“You have to carry the fire."
I don't know how to."
Yes, you do."
Is the fire real? The fire?"
Yes it is."
Where is it? I don't know where it is."
Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

Source: The Road

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

Source: The Road

“If only my heart were stone.”

Source: The Road

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”

Source: The Road

“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”

Source: All the Pretty Horses (1992)
Context: He thought he'd be an object of some curiosity but the people he saw only nodded gravely to him and passed on. He carried the bucket back into the store and went down the street to where there was a small cafe and he entered and sat at one of the three small wooden tables. The floor of the cafe was packed mud newly swept and he was the only customer. He stood the rifle against the wall and ordered huevos revueltos and a cup of chocolate and he sat and waited for it to come and then he ate very slowly. The food was rich to his taste and the chocolate was made with canela and he drank it and ordered another and folded a tortilla and ate and watched the horses standing in the square across the street and watched the girls. They'd hung the gazebo with crepe and it looked like a festooned brush-pile. The proprietor showed him great courtesy and brought him fresh tortillas hot from the comal and told him that there was to be a wedding and that it would be a pity if it rained. He inquired where he might be from and showed surprise he'd come so far. He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”

Source: All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

Source: The Crossing

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”

“The point is there ain't no point.”

Source: The Road

“If you break little promises, you'll break big ones.”

Source: No Country for Old Men

“I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.”

Source: The Road

“You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.”

“Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”

Source: No Country for Old Men

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”

Source: The Road

“What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.”

Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”

Source: The Road

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

Source: No Country for Old Men

“He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”

Source: The Road

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”

Source: All The Pretty Horses: All The Pretty Horses

“Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I don't recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.”

Source: The Road

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

Source: No Country for Old Men (2005)

“Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin?”

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter V
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“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.”

Source: No Country for Old Men

“I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.”

Source: The Road

“How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.
I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.”

Source: No Country for Old Men (2005)
Context: I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”

Source: The Road

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

Source: No Country for Old Men (2005)

“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”

Variant: You have my whole heart. You always did.
Source: The Road

“Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

Source: No Country for Old Men

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”

The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009, "Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html by John Jurgensen  <br class="br">Variant: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. <br class="br">Context: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”

Source: The Road

“I will do what I promised." He whispered. "No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.”

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter III
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West