Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

254. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

256. “They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”

— Cormac McCarthy

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

260. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

262. “Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”

— Cormac McCarthy

263. “If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.”

— Cormac McCarthy

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “There is no description of a fool that you fail to satisfy.”

— Cormac McCarthy

268. “You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the Devil was at his elbow.”

— Cormac McCarthy

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”

— Cormac McCarthy

273. “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

274. “He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.”

— Cormac McCarthy

275. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

279. “Your brother is young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy. Perhaps you believe this also?”

— Cormac McCarthy

280. “She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”

— Cormac McCarthy

281. “The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

282. “Beware, gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.”

— Cormac McCarthy

283. “Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.”

— Cormac McCarthy

284. “He looked at her. After a while he said: It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You don’t start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it. You understand what I’m sayin?”

— Cormac McCarthy

285. “One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.”

— Cormac McCarthy

286. “The shape of the city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.”

— Cormac McCarthy

287. “When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.”

— Cormac McCarthy

288. “My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.”

— Cormac McCarthy

289. “Where the bodies are buried in the desert is a certain world, Counselor. Where they are simply left in the street is another. That is a country heretofore unknown to me. But it must have always been there, must it not?”

— Cormac McCarthy

290. “He walked to the top of a rise and crouched and watched the day accrue. The chary dawn, the cold illucid world.”

— Cormac McCarthy

291. “Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.”

— Cormac McCarthy

292. “There is no greater monster than reason.”

— Cormac McCarthy

293. “The boy’s candlecolored skin was all but translucent.”

— Cormac McCarthy

294. “In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.”

— Cormac McCarthy

295. “This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.”

— Cormac McCarthy

296. “In my father’s last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”

— Cormac McCarthy

297. “There was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.”

— Cormac McCarthy

298. “I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.”

— Cormac McCarthy

299. “He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”

— Cormac McCarthy

300. “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”

— Cormac McCarthy