Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “Each the others world entire.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

217. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

219. “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

220. “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

221. “You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.”

— Cormac McCarthy

222. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

227. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

229. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

249. “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

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250. “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