Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”

— Cormac McCarthy

153. “Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.”

— Cormac McCarthy

154. “Ever step you take is forever.”

— Cormac McCarthy

155. “Suffering is part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.”

— Cormac McCarthy

156. “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?”

— Cormac McCarthy

157. “Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.”

— Cormac McCarthy

158. “You’re free white and twenty-one so I reckon you can do whatever you want.”

— Cormac McCarthy

159. “How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

161. “At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned.”

— Cormac McCarthy

162. “That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash.”

— Cormac McCarthy

163. “What is it? Nothing. I had a bad dream. What did you dream about? Nothing. Are you okay? No. He put his arms around him and held him. It’s okay, he said. I was crying. But you didnt wake up. I’m sorry. I was just so tired. I meant in the dream.”

— Cormac McCarthy

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

167. “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain.”

— Cormac McCarthy

168. “Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.”

— Cormac McCarthy

169. “But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.”

— Cormac McCarthy

170. “This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job.”

— Cormac McCarthy

171. “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

172. “He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them. Y.”

— Cormac McCarthy

173. “They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It’s us, Papa, the boy whispered. It’s us.”

— Cormac McCarthy

174. “I think our time is up. I know. Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.”

— Cormac McCarthy

175. “They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.”

— Cormac McCarthy

176. “It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.”

— Cormac McCarthy

177. “Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?”

— Cormac McCarthy

178. “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

179. “The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

180. “They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves.”

— Cormac McCarthy

181. “When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”

— Cormac McCarthy

182. “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”

— Cormac McCarthy

183. “Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”

— Cormac McCarthy

184. “And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.”

— Cormac McCarthy

185. “It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight...”

— Cormac McCarthy

186. “Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?”

— Cormac McCarthy

187. “Dark of the invisible moon. The night now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”

— Cormac McCarthy

188. “In the night’s in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.”

— Cormac McCarthy

189. “Each the others world entire.”

— Cormac McCarthy

190. “All other trades are contained in that of war. Is that why war endures? No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.”

— Cormac McCarthy

191. “That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.”

— Cormac McCarthy

192. “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

193. “You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.”

— Cormac McCarthy

194. “In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.”

— Cormac McCarthy

195. “For let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures. The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. Is that right? Aye.”

— Cormac McCarthy

196. “Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said.”

— Cormac McCarthy

197. “Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now.”

— Cormac McCarthy

198. “He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

199. “The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.”

— Cormac McCarthy

200. “Men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.”

— Cormac McCarthy