Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”

— Cormac McCarthy

102. “Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”

— Cormac McCarthy

103. “They were watching, out there past men’s knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”

— Cormac McCarthy

104. “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

105. “People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don’t deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things.”

— Cormac McCarthy

106. “He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is.”

— Cormac McCarthy

107. “She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.”

— Cormac McCarthy

108. “How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don’t guess you would know it. You’d just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn’t make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else died too.”

— Cormac McCarthy

109. “When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”

— Cormac McCarthy

110. “When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

114. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

120. “He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

121. “What business is it of yours where I’m from, friendo?”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

123. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here. Yeah. You don’t think that’s so great. It’s okay.”

— Cormac McCarthy

129. “The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

131. “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

133. “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

— Cormac McCarthy

134. “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

135. “What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death.”

— Cormac McCarthy

136. “War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

138. “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

139. “The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”

— Cormac McCarthy

140. “A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They’re always more trouble than what they’re worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.”

— Cormac McCarthy

141. “Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.”

— Cormac McCarthy

142. “I’ve always been interested in the Southwest. There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.”

— Cormac McCarthy

143. “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

144. “Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.”

— Cormac McCarthy

145. “I think sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

147. “Ich kann nicht anders.”

— Cormac McCarthy

148. “For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.”

— Cormac McCarthy

149. “If there’s one thing on this planet you don’t look like it’s a bunch of good luck walkin around.”

— Cormac McCarthy

150. “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