Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

154. “When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.”

— Cormac McCarthy

155. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

158. “Ich kann nicht anders.”

— Cormac McCarthy

159. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

162. “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

163. “Ever step you take is forever.”

— Cormac McCarthy

164. “He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.”

— Cormac McCarthy

165. “The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there’s nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

167. “The stars in flood above her. The lower edges of the firmament sawed out into the black shapes of the mountains and the lights of the cities burning on the plain like stars pooled in a lake.”

— Cormac McCarthy

168. “What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

171. “He lay down in his blankets. It was growing dark, long late mid-summer twilight in the woods. He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad. He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm. My life is ghastly, he told the grass.”

— Cormac McCarthy

172. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

175. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

177. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

191. “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

192. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

200. “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