Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

381. “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

382. “Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you’ve not already given?”

— Cormac McCarthy

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

389. “He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

— Cormac McCarthy

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

397. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

399. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Quotes About Stories