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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 quotes7 likes

Cormac McCarthy Quotes

“She came from the shower wrapped in a towel and she sat on the bed and took his hand and looked down at him. I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot. He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“What good do you think it does to waller all over a horse thataway? said Rawlins.
I dont know, said John Grady. I aint a horse.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol enacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter VII

“Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian.”

Cormac McCarthy book Outer Dark

Outer Dark (1968)

“You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

“In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

“What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It’s a great thing, the dance.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

The judge
Blood Meridian (1985)

“He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

“He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter I

“Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

The judge
Blood Meridian (1985)

“The priest looked at him. Do I know you? he said.
Suttree placed one hand on the pew in front of him. An old woman was going along the altar rail with a dusting rag. He struggled to his feet. No, he said. You dont know me.
The priest stepped back, inspecting is clothes, his fishstained shoes.
I just fell asleep a minute. I was resting.
The priest gave a little smile, lightly touched with censure, remonstrance gentled. God's house is not exactly the place to take a nap, he said.
It's not God's house.
I beg your pardon?
It's not God's house.
Oh?
Suttree waved his hand vaguely and stepped past the priest and went down the aisle. The priest watched him. He smiled sadly, but a smile for that.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 255
Suttree (1979)

“We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

“People see what they want to see.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

“I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky. —John Joel Glanton.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Cormac McCarthy

The New York Times, April 19, 1992, "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html by Richard B. Woodward

“I cant back up and start over. But I dont see the point in slobberin over it. And I cant see where it would make me feel better to be able to point a finger at somebody else.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“It had already occurred to him that he would probably never be safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to. And if you did?”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.”

Cormac McCarthy book Cities of the Plain

Cities of the Plain (1998)

“It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.71

“Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter III

“White: You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.”

Cormac McCarthy The Sunset Limited

The Sunset Limited (2006)

“This is a terrible place to die in.
Where’s a good one?”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“When he looked back at the primadonna she was watching them through the spyglasses. As if she might better assess them in that way where they set forth upon the shadowbanded road, the coming twilight. Inhabiting only that ocular ground in which the country appeared out of nothing and vanished again into nothing, tree and rock and the darkening mountains beyond, all of it contained and itself containing only what was needed and nothing more.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

“Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“The hour that followed was a long hour.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“…he shook his head at the wonderful invention of folly in its guises and forms.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“If it ain't a mess, it'll do till the mess gets here.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.149

“The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

“Black: Belief aint like unbelief. If you a believer then you got to come finally to a well of belief itself and then you dont have to look no further. There aint no further. But the unbeliever has got a problem. He has set out to unravel the world, but everthing he can point to that aint true leaves two new things layin there. If God walked the earth when he got done makin it then when you get up in the mornin' you get to put your feet on a real floor and you dont have to worry about where it come from. But if he didnt then you got to come up with a whole other description of what you even mean by real. And you got to judge everything by that same light. If light is is. Includin yourself. One question fits all.”

Cormac McCarthy The Sunset Limited

The Sunset Limited (2006)

“They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter XII

“Yes, he said. I busted him and he busted me. That's fair, ain't it?The boy was still silent, calmly incredulous.No, Sylder went on, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that throws it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Orchard Keeper

The Orchard Keeper (1965)

“There aint but one truth, said John Grady. The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody's mouth.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IV

“Yes mam. I'm sorry you've had such troubles.
Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.”

Cormac McCarthy book Outer Dark

Outer Dark (1968)

“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.130

“The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities. In their minds. They pretend to themselves that they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. And it is always one's stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one's enemies. Or discourages it.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“You think about all that stuff that can happen to you, he said. There aint no end to it.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

“He (Wells) closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. 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 book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“[W]hen you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon somethin that you may very well not be equal to and I think that this is one of them things. When you've said that it's real and not just in your head I'm not all that sure what it is you have said.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“I’ll tell you somethin, Sheriff. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter. I think about that”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

“What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)