Cormac McCarthy: Trending quotes

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

Courage , Betrayal

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

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

Source: No Country for Old Men (2005)

Bad luck

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

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Forgetting

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

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

Past

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

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

“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.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

People

“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.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Thinking , Forgetting

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

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

God

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

Cormac McCarthy

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

Knowledge

“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.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

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.

Pain , World , Fear , Way

“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.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

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.

Pain , World , Beauty , Flowers

“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.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

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?

Life , Thinking