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Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres.

McCarthy's fifth novel, Blood Meridian , was on Time magazine's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books since 1923.

For All the Pretty Horses , he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God have also been adapted as motion pictures.

McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road . In 2010, The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying".

✵ 20. July 1933   •   Other names کورمک مک‌کارتی
Cormac McCarthy photo
Cormac McCarthy: 270   quotes 7   likes

Cormac McCarthy Quotes

“Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge”

Cormac McCarthy

Source: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

War , Learning , Heart , Dance

“What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 130
Source: Suttree (1979)
Context: Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as in this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.

God , Soul

“The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Silence , Night

“I was afraid I was going to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.”

Cormac McCarthy

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

“My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.”

Cormac McCarthy
Time , Perfection

“My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

“The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad?

What do you think?

Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here.

Yeah.

You don't think that's so great.

It's okay.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Life , Thinking

“Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Boy , Time

“It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight…”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

Source: No Country for Old Men

Time

“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 book Suttree

page 154
Source: Suttree (1979)
Context: 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.

God , Dreams

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

Cormac McCarthy

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter II
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Context: A man’ s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

God , Evil

“No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?

No.

It's never like what you expected.

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

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

Source: The Crossing

Life , People

“Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.”

Cormac McCarthy
Life , Way

“And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Death , Dreams , Color

“All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.”

Cormac McCarthy

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter XI, Judge Holden
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Rage

“There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

Source: Suttree

“I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Way

“Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone.
She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.”

Cormac McCarthy book Outer Dark

Outer Dark (1968)

World , Soul

“I never knowed there was such a place as this.
I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

Thinking

“The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Travel , Understanding

“And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief.”

Cormac McCarthy book Outer Dark

Outer Dark (1968)

Waiting , Housing , Dead

“You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said, I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.158

God , People , Thinking

“If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the 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 book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

World , Way , Strong , Wolf

“Where is your country? he said.
I don't know, said John Grady. I don't know where it is. I don't know what happens to country.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

Country

“In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

History , Sleep , Science

“The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Men , War , Smile , Game

“My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Books , Falseness

“He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realised that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

Thinking

“There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Fools

“In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching shape in the glass of the depot door. His fetch come up from life's other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

Source: Suttree (1979), Chapter 1, page 28

Life , Laughter

“Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

World , Way

“When they went down to the bunkhouse for dinner the vaqueros seemed to treat them with a certain deference but whether it was the deference accorded the accomplished or that accorded to mental defectives they were unsure.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Past

“White: I long for Darkness. I pray for death, real death. And if I thought that in death I would meet the people I knew in life, I don't know what I would do. That would be the ultimate horror, the ultimate nightmare. If I thought I was gonna meet my mother again an' start all of that over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to… that would be the final nightmare. Goddamn Kafka on wheels.”

Cormac McCarthy The Sunset Limited

The Sunset Limited (2006)

Life , Death , People , Time

“I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Truth , Understanding , Thinking , Time

“Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“The old man … said … the notion that men can be understood was probably an illusion.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

Men

“He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.162

Love , Death , World , Sadness

“He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Men , Pain , Truth , World

“For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IX

Men , Parting

“Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter XI

Books , World

“Where is yesterday? … And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Dance

“Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it?”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

People , History , Problem , Parting

“I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.”

Cormac McCarthy

The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009, "Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html by John Jurgensen

World , Thinking , Learning

“The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”

Cormac McCarthy book Cities of the Plain

Cities of the Plain (1998)

Secret , Youth , Age , World