Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain.”

— Cormac McCarthy

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

157. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

164. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

166. “Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.”

— Cormac McCarthy

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.”

— Cormac McCarthy

172. “What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

174. “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

175. “The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.”

— Cormac McCarthy

176. “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

177. “Where men cant live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone. So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true. Things will be better when everybody’s gone.”

— Cormac McCarthy

178. “Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.”

— Cormac McCarthy

179. “He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

180. “If fate is the law, then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It’s in our nature. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.”

— Cormac McCarthy

181. “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

182. “Each the others world entire.”

— Cormac McCarthy

183. “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

184. “The freedom of birds is an insult to me.”

— Cormac McCarthy

185. “His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep.”

— Cormac McCarthy

186. “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”

— Cormac McCarthy

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.”

— Cormac McCarthy

191. “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

192. “Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease.”

— Cormac McCarthy

193. “The hundred nights they’d sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall.”

— Cormac McCarthy

194. “Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I’m sayin?”

— Cormac McCarthy

195. “Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.”

— Cormac McCarthy

196. “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”

— Cormac McCarthy

197. “You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.”

— Cormac McCarthy

198. “He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death.”

— Cormac McCarthy

199. “Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.”

— Cormac McCarthy

200. “No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.”

— Cormac McCarthy