Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

254. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

259. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

264. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

269. “We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn’t fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

272. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.”

— Cormac McCarthy

286. “From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.”

— Cormac McCarthy

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

290. “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

291. “He’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.”

— Cormac McCarthy

292. “The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.”

— Cormac McCarthy

293. “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

294. “He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said. That’s what you think. You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot. Yes they will. But you wont. How do you figure that? Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.”

— Cormac McCarthy

295. “The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.”

— Cormac McCarthy

296. “I don’t think goodness is something that you learn. If you’re left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.”

— Cormac McCarthy

297. “Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

298. “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

299. “Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they’d yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life.”

— Cormac McCarthy

300. “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