Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The spotlight kept rowing back and forth across the face of the ridge. Methodically. Bright shuttle, dark loom.”

— Cormac McCarthy

302. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

306. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

311. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Hard people make hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why god ain’t put out the sun and gone away.”

— Cormac McCarthy

317. “Last words are only words.”

— Cormac McCarthy

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”

— Cormac McCarthy

322. “The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”

— Cormac McCarthy

323. “When the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be their yet.”

— Cormac McCarthy

324. “She smiled. I think it’s just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think. Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then.”

— Cormac McCarthy

325. “There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It’s just a tree falling, he said. It’s okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It’s okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.”

— Cormac McCarthy

326. “Ah me, thou Destiny, Giver of evil gifts.”

— Cormac McCarthy

327. “The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.”

— Cormac McCarthy

328. “Do you have any notion of how goddamned crazy you are?”

— Cormac McCarthy

329. “He’d taken up a pallet between Toadvine and another Kentuckian, a veteran of the war. This man had returned to claim some darkeyed love he’d left behind two years before when Doniphan’s command pulled east for Saltillo and the officers had had to drive back hundreds of young girls dressed as boys that took the road behind the army.”

— Cormac McCarthy

330. “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

331. “She patted his hand. Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There God’s plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world.”

— Cormac McCarthy

332. “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.” -The Judge.”

— Cormac McCarthy

333. “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

334. “He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men’s claims to know God’s mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

335. “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

336. “Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

337. “What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.”

— Cormac McCarthy

338. “The night was cold and clear and the sparks rising from the fire raced hot and red among the stars.”

— Cormac McCarthy

339. “The world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.”

— Cormac McCarthy

340. “I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen.”

— Cormac McCarthy

341. “Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. 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

342. “What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.”

— Cormac McCarthy

343. “She said: Sheriff how come you to let crime get so out of hand in your county? Sounded like a fair question I reckon. Maybe it was a fair question. Anyway I told her, I said: It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.”

— Cormac McCarthy

344. “All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

346. “What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”

— Cormac McCarthy

347. “They went on in the perfect blackness, sightless as the blind.”

— Cormac McCarthy

348. “Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam’s flank.”

— Cormac McCarthy

349. “In truth they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadnt drunk.”

— Cormac McCarthy

350. “I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.”

— Cormac McCarthy