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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

306. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

315. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

324. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

329. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

341. “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

342. “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

343. “Vive in silenzio il Dio che ha purgato questa terra con sale e cenere.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

345. “Last words are only words.”

— Cormac McCarthy

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

350. “The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror that men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.”

— Cormac McCarthy