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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

271. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

273. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

276. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

278. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

290. “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

291. “He said that war had destroyed the country and that men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent’s flesh for its bite. He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”

— Cormac McCarthy

292. “They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.”

— Cormac McCarthy

293. “He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

294. “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

295. “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.”

— Cormac McCarthy

296. “He could see the truck in the moonlight at the top of the rise. He looked off to one side of it to see it the better. There was someone standing beside it. Then they were gone. There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy. Now you’re goin to die.”

— Cormac McCarthy

297. “In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like heathen candles.”

— Cormac McCarthy

298. “Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world.”

— Cormac McCarthy

299. “In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased.”

— Cormac McCarthy

300. “It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.”

— Cormac McCarthy