Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as we once were and yet we mourn the days.”

— Cormac McCarthy

452. “He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old.”

— Cormac McCarthy

453. “In this world the mask is what is true.”

— Cormac McCarthy

454. “Because beauty has power to call forth a grief that is beyond the reach of other tragedies. The loss of a great beauty can bring an entire nation to its knees. Nothing else can do that.”

— Cormac McCarthy

455. “What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man’s jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?”

— Cormac McCarthy

456. “Most people’ll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They cant wait to see him.”

— Cormac McCarthy

457. “There ain’t no law in Mexico. It’s just a pack of rogues.”

— Cormac McCarthy

458. “To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.”

— Cormac McCarthy

459. “What you wants with these goats anyway? Little or nothin. Good fresh milk. God’s best cheese. You have any other animals? said Suttree. Dog or anything? No. Just goats. I think a feller gets started with goats he just more or less sticks to goats.”

— Cormac McCarthy

460. “The next day on the far side of the mountain we encountered the two lads that had deserted us. Hangin upside down in a tree. They’d been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man’s appearance.”

— Cormac McCarthy

461. “I don’t know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

462. “The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less.”

— Cormac McCarthy

463. “He is dancing, dancing. He says he’ll never die.”

— Cormac McCarthy

464. “It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.”

— Cormac McCarthy

465. “Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you’ve not already given?”

— Cormac McCarthy

466. “Because I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasnt going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.”

— Cormac McCarthy

467. “Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said.”

— Cormac McCarthy

468. “They mounted, pistols in hand, saps of rawhide and riverrock looped about their wrists like the implements of some primitive equestrian game. Glanton looked back at them and then nudged forth his horse.”

— Cormac McCarthy

469. “All through the long dusk.”

— Cormac McCarthy

470. “There’s a kind of man that when he cant have what he wants he wont take the next best thing but the worst he can find.”

— Cormac McCarthy

471. “It just bothered me that you might think I’m somethin special. I aint.”

— Cormac McCarthy

472. “The judge sat that animal bareback like an indian and rode with his grip and his rifle perched on the withers and he looked about him with the greatest satisfaction in the world, as if everything had turned out just as he planned and the day could not have been finer.”

— Cormac McCarthy

473. “What do you say to a man that by his own admission has now soul? Why would you say anything?”

— Cormac McCarthy

474. “All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both.”

— Cormac McCarthy

475. “But the old woman said that some have no choice. She said that for the poor any choice was a gift with two faces.”

— Cormac McCarthy

476. “He told how he had seen the lies run down the lawyer’s tongue. Vague but of a substance, they came down like mice and looked about a moment before scuttling off.”

— Cormac McCarthy

477. “Well, I think the questioner wants the truth. The doubter wants to be told there aint no such thing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

478. “Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. All in our custody seethes with an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.”

— Cormac McCarthy

479. “He’d bivouacked on the north side of the town.”

— Cormac McCarthy

480. “We could of brought weeners, she said. Yeah. Marshmallers. You wouldnt think a car would burn like that.”

— Cormac McCarthy

481. “They wont ride at night, said Brown. The recruit looked back at the figures gathered about the keg in that scoured and darkening waste. Why wont they? he said. Brown spat. Because it’s dark, he said.”

— Cormac McCarthy

482. “He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

483. “Maybe hope springs eternal in the whale’s heart too. I don’t know. If you look at the history of species there seems to be no selective advantage to intelligence. It’s the microbes who have totally ignored selection for three and a half billion years that remain with us and probably will remain. They seem almost immortal. The process of evolution appears to be about specialization and adaptation and yet these are the very things that seem ultimately to mediate against survival itself.”

— Cormac McCarthy

484. “Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs.”

— Cormac McCarthy

485. “Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.”

— Cormac McCarthy

486. “In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God – who knows all that can be known – seems powerless to change.”

— Cormac McCarthy

487. “They stood among their horses in the squalid little alameda while the wind ransacked the trees and the birds nesting in the gray twilight cried out and clutched the limbs and the snow swirled and blew across the little square and shrouded the shapes of the mud buildings beyond and made mute the cries of the vendors who’d followed them.”

— Cormac McCarthy

488. “The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dimmed and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams encased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night.”

— Cormac McCarthy

489. “He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with vigor unknown to the sane. Suttree admired them with their hot eyes and dogeared bibles, God’s barkers gone forth into the world like the prophets of old.”

— Cormac McCarthy

490. “They came three times for the old man. At first it was just the Sheriff and Gifford. They were one foot up the porch steps when he swung the door open and threw down on them and they could see the mule ears of the old shotgun laid back viciously along the locks. They turned and went back down the yard, not saying anything or even looking back, and the old man closed the door behind them.”

— Cormac McCarthy

491. “I’ve been at some pains to tell you about myself because among other reasons I think we should know who our enemies are. I’ve known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people.”

— Cormac McCarthy

492. “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.”

— Cormac McCarthy

493. “All progressions from a higher to lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe.”

— Cormac McCarthy

494. “Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew. On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.”

— Cormac McCarthy

495. “Toadvine was four steps above him and when he kicked him he caught him in the throat.”

— Cormac McCarthy

496. “The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.”

— Cormac McCarthy

497. “The task of the narrator is not an easy one, he said. He appears to be required to choose his tale from among the many that are possible. But of course that is not the case. The case is rather to make many of the one.”

— Cormac McCarthy

498. “What if a whole goddamned building was to just up and sink? What about two or three buildings? What about a whole block? Harrogate was waving his bottle about. Goddamn, he said. What if the whole fuckin city was to cave in? That’s the spirit, said Suttree.”

— Cormac McCarthy

499. “There’s a way to train a horse where when you get done you’ve got the horse. On his own ground. A good horse will figure things out on his own. You can see what’s in his heart. He wont do one thing while you’re watching him and another when you aint. He’s all of a piece. When you’ve got a horse to that place you cant hardly get him to do somethin he knows is wrong. He’ll fight you over it. And if you mistreat him it just about kills him. A good horse has justice in his heart.”

— Cormac McCarthy

500. “All patched up out of parts and lowslung and bumping over the ruts. Filled with old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet.”

— Cormac McCarthy