Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

308. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

314. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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. “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

322. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

328. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.”

— Cormac McCarthy

341. “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

342. “Last words are only words.”

— Cormac McCarthy

343. “You can tell it any way you want but that’s the way it is. I should of done it and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn’t mine. It never has been.”

— Cormac McCarthy

344. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

350. “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