Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth’s cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.”

— Cormac McCarthy

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

356. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

358. “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

359. “Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.”

— Cormac McCarthy

360. “The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad’s pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart’s in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.”

— Cormac McCarthy

361. “She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart.”

— Cormac McCarthy

362. “For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?”

— Cormac McCarthy

363. “Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.”

— Cormac McCarthy

364. “You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

366. “When you’re a kid you have these notions about how things are going to be... You get a little older and you pull back on some of that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.”

— Cormac McCarthy

367. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

369. “If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I don’t believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.”

— Cormac McCarthy

370. “This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we’ve all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?”

— Cormac McCarthy

371. “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

372. “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the moon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”

— Cormac McCarthy

373. “Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with root, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.”

— Cormac McCarthy

374. “It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.”

— Cormac McCarthy

375. “Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that.”

— Cormac McCarthy

376. “He had no faith in the power of men to act wisely in their own behalf. It was his view rather that every act soon eluded the grasp of its propagator to be swept away in a clamorous tide of unforeseen consequence. He believed that in the world was another agenda, another order, and with this power lay whatever brief he may have held. In the meantime he waited to be called to he knew not what.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

378. “You are either born a writer or you are not.”

— Cormac McCarthy

379. “The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.”

— Cormac McCarthy

380. “They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart.”

— Cormac McCarthy

381. “When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.”

— Cormac McCarthy

382. “A man gets older, he said, he finds they’s lots of things he can do jest as well without and so he don’t have to worry about this and that the way a young feller will. I worked near all my life and never had nothin. Seems like a old man’d be allowed his rest but then he comes to find they’s things you have to do on account of nobody else wants to attend to em... Most ever man loves peace, he said, and none better than a old man.”

— Cormac McCarthy

383. “A dead man’s dog ain’t got a name.”

— Cormac McCarthy

384. “When it stops, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life.”

— Cormac McCarthy

385. “Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.”

— Cormac McCarthy

386. “Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter.”

— Cormac McCarthy

387. “If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?”

— Cormac McCarthy

388. “It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.”

— Cormac McCarthy

389. “Maybe it’s like Mac says. Ever man winds up with the horse that suits him.”

— Cormac McCarthy

390. “Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.”

— Cormac McCarthy

391. “There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp’s globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.”

— Cormac McCarthy

392. “I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.”

— Cormac McCarthy

393. “There, he said. You see? You see how this is bad for one’s billiard game? This thinking? The French have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game. No evil is beyond them.”

— Cormac McCarthy

394. “If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”

— Cormac McCarthy

395. “Are you no afraid of God? I got no reason to be afraid of God. I’ve even got a bone or two to pick with Him. You.”

— Cormac McCarthy

396. “The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin.”

— Cormac McCarthy

397. “The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.”

— Cormac McCarthy

398. “The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off.”

— Cormac McCarthy

399. “Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes.”

— Cormac McCarthy

400. “This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.”

— Cormac McCarthy