Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

204. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

206. “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view.”

— Cormac McCarthy

207. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

209. “Where man can’t live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone.”

— Cormac McCarthy

210. “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

211. “The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

214. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

216. “In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.”

— Cormac McCarthy

217. “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

218. “DOOMED ENTERPRISES divide lives forever into the then and the now.”

— Cormac McCarthy

219. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

222. “I couldn’t trust you with it. To do something with it. I don’t want anybody talking about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean, you could talk about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody. I think in times like these the less said the better. If something had happened and we were survivors and we met on the road then we’d have something to talk about. But we’re not. So we don’t.”

— Cormac McCarthy

223. “He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.”

— Cormac McCarthy

224. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

226. “He sat by a gray window in the gray light in an abandoned house in the late afternoon and read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint concerns.”

— Cormac McCarthy

227. “I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t.”

— Cormac McCarthy

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

231. “He had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance.”

— Cormac McCarthy

232. “As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.”

— Cormac McCarthy

233. “The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.”

— Cormac McCarthy

234. “Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?”

— Cormac McCarthy

235. “She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

236. “Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.”

— Cormac McCarthy

237. “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again.”

— Cormac McCarthy

238. “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?”

— Cormac McCarthy

239. “In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.”

— Cormac McCarthy

240. “And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.”

— Cormac McCarthy

241. “Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

243. “I ain’t got an original thought in my head. If it ain’t got the scent of divinity to it, I ain’t interested in it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

244. “He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.”

— Cormac McCarthy

245. “He looked up. His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he’d been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was.”

— Cormac McCarthy

246. “Here beyond men’s judgments all covenants were brittle.”

— Cormac McCarthy

247. “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.”

— Cormac McCarthy

248. “I was afraid I was going to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.”

— Cormac McCarthy

249. “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.”

— Cormac McCarthy

250. “A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost.”

— Cormac McCarthy