Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “The skiff swung gently, drifting in the current. He undid his shirt to the waist and put one forearm to his eyes. He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face.”

— Cormac McCarthy

455. “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

456. “What loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peeled, blue and bulbous and palely luminescent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I.”

— Cormac McCarthy

457. “He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up at last by the very void to which we wished to stand opposed.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

459. “A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.”

— Cormac McCarthy

460. “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

461. “Where he walked the tideline at dusk the last red reaches of the sun flared slowly out along the sky to the west and the tidepools stood like spills of blood. He stopped to look back at his bare footprints. Filling with water one by one. The reefs seemed to move slowly in the last hours and the late colors of the sun drained away and then the sudden darkness fell like a foundry shutting down for the night.”

— Cormac McCarthy

462. “Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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463. “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

464. “A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.”

— Cormac McCarthy

465. “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

466. “Housecats is smart too. Smarter’n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain’t on account of you cain’t learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won’t learn nothin. They too smart.”

— Cormac McCarthy

467. “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

468. “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

469. “He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again.”

— Cormac McCarthy

470. “They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship’s wake.”

— Cormac McCarthy

471. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

473. “Suttree ducked the yardlong coil of dead flies that hung from the ceiling and came to the counter with his purchases.”

— Cormac McCarthy

474. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

476. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

483. “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

484. “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

485. “If something did not love you you would not be here.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

492. “Cuando los corderos se pierden en el monte, dijo, se les oye llorar. Unas veces acude la madre. Otras el lobo. Les.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

494. “All through the long dusk.”

— Cormac McCarthy

495. “He keeps from off the king’s road for fear of citizenry.”

— Cormac McCarthy

496. “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

497. “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?”

— Cormac McCarthy

498. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

500. “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

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