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

152. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

154. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

156. “Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”

— Cormac McCarthy

157. “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.” -The Judge.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

160. “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

161. “Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. – The judge.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

168. “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

169. “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

170. “Ich kann nicht anders.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

173. “The judge sat that animal bareback like an indian and rode with his grip and his rifle perched on the withers and he looked about him with the greatest satisfaction in the world, as if everything had turned out just as he planned and the day could not have been finer.”

— Cormac McCarthy

174. “Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.”

— Cormac McCarthy

175. “The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.”

— Cormac McCarthy

176. “Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.”

— Cormac McCarthy

177. “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

178. “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

179. “A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

181. “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

182. “Contemplating death is supposed to have a certain philosophical value. Palliative even. Trivial to say, but the best way to die well is to live well. To die for another would give your death meaning. Ignoring for the time being the fact that the other is going to die anyway.”

— Cormac McCarthy

183. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

193. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy