Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Quotes About Fire

3. “We’re carrying the fire.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Intelligent Quotes

5. “People don’t pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.”

— Cormac McCarthy

6. “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

— Cormac McCarthy

7. “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Real Quotes

10. “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

— Cormac McCarthy

11. “Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.”

— Cormac McCarthy

12. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

14. “But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse.”

— Cormac McCarthy

15. “All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

17. “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

18. “To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere.”

— Cormac McCarthy

19. “Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way.”

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Creative Quotes

20. “You say you can’t? Then don’t do it. That’s all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

21. “If only my heart were stone.”

— Cormac McCarthy

22. “The wind sounded of Mother Earth’s forsaken and abandoned cries.”

— Cormac McCarthy

23. “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.”

— Cormac McCarthy

24. “It’s the tide. It’s the dismal tide. It’s not the one thing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

25. “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

26. “I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

28. “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”

— Cormac McCarthy

29. “The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn’t know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren’t.”

— Cormac McCarthy

30. “I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you’re just too close to it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

32. “The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

34. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

37. “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”

— Cormac McCarthy

38. “People think they know what they want but they generally don’t. Sometimes if they’re lucky they’ll get it anyways.”

— Cormac McCarthy

39. “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.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

41. “I got here the same way the coin did.”

— Cormac McCarthy

42. “Teaching writing is a hustle.”

— Cormac McCarthy

43. “It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

47. “Every man’s death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.”

— Cormac McCarthy

48. “The rain falls upon the just And also on the unjust fellas But mostly it falls upon the just Cause the unjust have the just’s umbrellas.”

— Cormac McCarthy

49. “Choose your enemies carefully ’cause they will define you Make them interesting ’cause in some ways they will mind you They’re not there in the beginning but when your story ends Gonna last with you longer than your friend.”

— Cormac McCarthy

50. “Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.”

— Cormac McCarthy