Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

457. “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

458. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

476. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

478. “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

479. “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

480. “I could tell you why – and you stit wouldn’t know. That’s all right. You can set and ast a bunch of idjit questions. But not knowin a thing ain’t never made it not so. Well, I’m a old man and I’ve seen some hard times, so I don’t reckon Brushy Mountain’ll be the worst place I was ever in.”

— Cormac McCarthy

481. “In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.”

— Cormac McCarthy

482. “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

483. “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

484. “It takes very little to govern good people.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

486. “The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you’ve got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death.”

— Cormac McCarthy

487. “He thought there could be deathships out there yet, drifting with their lolling rags of sail. Or life in the deep. Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness. Shuttling past like trains, eyes the size of saucers. And perhaps beyond those shrouded wells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.”

— Cormac McCarthy

488. “Boyd aint goin nowhere. If I am he is. Boyd’s a juvenile. They aint goin to turn him over to you. Hell. You’re a juvenile yourself. I aint askin.”

— Cormac McCarthy

489. “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

490. “He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her.”

— Cormac McCarthy

491. “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

492. “I aint drinkin after no mule, said the hermit. Have you not got no old bucket nor nothin?”

— Cormac McCarthy

493. “All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various times after they’d said they’d be there. I never heard one yet that didnt have a reason for it. Yessir. But there aint but one reason. Yessir. You know what it is? No sir. It’s that their word’s no good. That’s the only reason there ever was or ever will be. Yessir.”

— Cormac McCarthy

494. “The purpose of all families in their lives and in their deaths is to create the traitor who will finally erase their history forever.”

— Cormac McCarthy

495. “There’s a difference between quittin and knowin when you’re beat.”

— Cormac McCarthy

496. “The tensile properties of this unratified truce were abused to the utmost of their enduring when the judge stood slightly in the saddle and raised his arm and spoke out a greeting beyond them.”

— Cormac McCarthy

497. “For this will to deceive that is in thing 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

498. “Live by yourself and you bound to talk yourself and when ye commence that folks start it up that you’re light in the head. But I reckon it’s all right to talk to a dog since most folks do even if a dog don’t understand and cain’t answer if he did.”

— Cormac McCarthy

499. “Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him.”

— Cormac McCarthy

500. “Glanton could see crouched in a corner a Mexican or halfbreed boy maybe twelve years old. He was naked save for a pair of old calzones and makeshift sandals of uncured hide. He glared back at Glanton with a sort of terrified insolence.”

— Cormac McCarthy