Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”

— Cormac McCarthy

102. “Hell ain’t half full.”

— Cormac McCarthy

103. “My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you.”

— Cormac McCarthy

104. “Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”

— Cormac McCarthy

105. “Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.”

— Cormac McCarthy

106. “The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.”

— Cormac McCarthy

107. “In every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die.”

— Cormac McCarthy

108. “It is supposed to 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 love of blood.”

— Cormac McCarthy

109. “You keep runnin that mouth and I’m goin to take you back there and screw you.”

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Romance Quotes

110. “Any time you’re throwin dirt you’re losin ground.”

— Cormac McCarthy

111. “There’s little equity in the Lord’s gifts.”

— Cormac McCarthy

112. “The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”

— Cormac McCarthy

113. “Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.”

— Cormac McCarthy

114. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”

— Cormac McCarthy

115. “For the poor any choice was a gift with two faces.”

— Cormac McCarthy

116. “Dying ain’t in people’s plans, is it?”

— Cormac McCarthy

117. “Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.”

— Cormac McCarthy

118. “He may be dead; or he may be teaching English.”

— Cormac McCarthy

119. “What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.”

— Cormac McCarthy

120. “If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.”

— Cormac McCarthy

121. “Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing...”

— Cormac McCarthy

122. “By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.”

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Book Quotes

123. “Pain for the old was no longer a surprise.”

— Cormac McCarthy

124. “They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

125. “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

126. “There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.”

— Cormac McCarthy

127. “Ever step you take is forever.”

— Cormac McCarthy

128. “The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy. I suppose that’s true. What then? Is that all that the world has in mind? If the world has a mind then it’s all worse than we thought.”

— Cormac McCarthy

129. “What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay.”

— Cormac McCarthy

130. “Qual es lo peor: Que soy pobre o que soy americano?”

— Cormac McCarthy

131. “Can’t stop what’s coming. Ain’t no waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

— Cormac McCarthy

132. “This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire.”

— Cormac McCarthy

133. “It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.”

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

134. “The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings.”

— Cormac McCarthy

135. “Just take me with you. Please. I cant. Please, Papa. I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.”

— Cormac McCarthy

136. “I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that’s just about the best kind of luck you can have.”

— Cormac McCarthy

137. “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

138. “There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”

— Cormac McCarthy

139. “When we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He’ll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He’ll say: where did everybody go? And that’s how it will be. What’s wrong with that?”

— Cormac McCarthy

140. “Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”

— Cormac McCarthy

141. “You have my whole heart. You always did.”

— Cormac McCarthy

142. “The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

143. “He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.”

— Cormac McCarthy

144. “He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.”

— Cormac McCarthy

145. “For things at a common destination there is a common path. Not always easy to see. But there.”

— Cormac McCarthy

146. “Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

147. “That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.”

— Cormac McCarthy

148. “Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.”

— Cormac McCarthy

149. “How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”

— Cormac McCarthy

150. “At our noblest we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.”

— Cormac McCarthy