Cormac McCarthy: Trending quotes (page 6)

“Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.”

“There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.”

“What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?”

“When you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”

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

“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.”

“…. A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They’re always more trouble than what they’re worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.”

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.”

“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.”

“The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.”

“Each the others world entire.”

“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”

“This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.”

“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.

[, New York Times, April 19, 1992]”

“Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.”

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

“Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”

“I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.”

“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”