Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “In truth they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadnt drunk.”

— Cormac McCarthy

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

365. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

367. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

377. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

379. “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

380. “When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

382. “It had ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.”

— Cormac McCarthy

383. “The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity.”

— Cormac McCarthy

384. “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

385. “In the nights sometimes now he’d wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.”

— Cormac McCarthy

386. “Glass flowers exploding. Slow trail of colors down the sky like stains dispersing in the sea, candescent polyps extinguished in the depths.”

— Cormac McCarthy

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

391. “No one spoke. There was none to curse and none to pray, we just watched.”

— Cormac McCarthy

392. “Themselves among others, everything in its place. Justified in the world.”

— Cormac McCarthy

393. “But I didn’t know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?”

— Cormac McCarthy

394. “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

395. “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

396. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Professor. Cause I aint sure either. I just get more amazed by the minute, that’s all. How come you cant see yourself, honey? You plain as glass. I can see the wheels turnin in there. The gears. And I can se the light too. Good light. True light. Cant you see it?”

— Cormac McCarthy

397. “What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many.”

— Cormac McCarthy

398. “He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he’d taken for talisman the simple human heart within him.”

— Cormac McCarthy

399. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy