Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

306. “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

307. “But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”

— Cormac McCarthy

308. “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

309. “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

310. “Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He.”

— Cormac McCarthy

311. “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

312. “He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

314. “La gente dice que el coyote es un brujo. Muchas veces el brujo es un coyote.”

— Cormac McCarthy

315. “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

316. “As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers.”

— Cormac McCarthy

317. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

322. “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

323. “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

324. “I’d rather to make a good run as a bad stand.”

— Cormac McCarthy

325. “It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.”

— Cormac McCarthy

326. “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

327. “The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women.”

— Cormac McCarthy

328. “The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.”

— Cormac McCarthy

329. “They’d put an awning up over the gravesite but the weather was all sideways and it did no good. The canvas rattled and flapped and the preacher’s words were lost in the wind.”

— Cormac McCarthy

330. “His dreams brightened. The vanished world returned.”

— Cormac McCarthy

331. “It is community and respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed.”

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Strong Quotes

332. “The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will.”

— Cormac McCarthy

333. “Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you’ve not already given?”

— Cormac McCarthy

334. “Forty minutes later he saw her and stopped and sat the horse and watched. She was riding along a red dirt ridge to the south sitting with her hands crossed on the pommel, looking toward the last of the sun, the horse slogging slowly through the loose sandy dirt, the red stain of it following them in the still air. That’s my heart yonder, he told the horse. It always was.”

— Cormac McCarthy

335. “The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale.”

— Cormac McCarthy

336. “And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys.”

— Cormac McCarthy

337. “Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he.”

— Cormac McCarthy

338. “Glanton was first to reach the dying man and he knelt with that alien and barbarous head cradled between his thighs like some reeking outland nurse and dared off the savages with his revolver. They circled on the plain and shook their bows and lofted a few arrows at him and then turned and rode on. Blood bubbled from the man’s chest and he turned his lost eyes upward, already glazed, the capillaries breaking up. In those dark pools there sat each a small and perfect sun.”

— Cormac McCarthy

339. “Algunas cosas las olvidas, no? Olvidas lo que quieres recordar y recuerdas lo que quieres olvidar.”

— Cormac McCarthy

340. “Yet the captain inhabited another space and it was a space of his own election and outside the common world of men.”

— Cormac McCarthy

341. “Still, I’ve got to hand it to you. As the trick said to the blind hooker.”

— Cormac McCarthy

342. “In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”

— Cormac McCarthy

343. “I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”

— Cormac McCarthy

344. “The spotlight kept rowing back and forth across the face of the ridge. Methodically. Bright shuttle, dark loom.”

— Cormac McCarthy

345. “She went to the window and looked out. The ground fell away to a branch where willows burned lime green in the sunset. Dark little birds kept crossing the fields to the west like heralds of some coming dread. Below the branch stood the frame of an outhouse from which the planks had been stripped for firewood and there hung from the ceiling a hornetnest like a gross paper egg. The tinker returned from the cart with a lantern.”

— Cormac McCarthy

346. “Females of domestic reputation lounged upon the balconies they passed with faces gotten up in indigo and almagre gaudy as the rumps of apes and they peered from behind their fans with a kind of lurid coyness like transvestites in a madhouse.”

— Cormac McCarthy

347. “I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I’ve known in life I don’t know what I’d do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.”

— Cormac McCarthy

348. “Men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.”

— Cormac McCarthy

349. “He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her.”

— Cormac McCarthy

350. “The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him. The smell of coalsmoke in the air at night. Old times, dead years. For him such memories are bitter ones.”

— Cormac McCarthy