Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Qual es lo peor: Que soy pobre o que soy americano?”

— Cormac McCarthy

102. “The point is there ain’t no point.”

— Cormac McCarthy

103. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

117. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

121. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

134. “We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn’t fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

136. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Romance Quotes

139. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

141. “Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

144. “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

145. “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

146. “Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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