Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child’s heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of’s come to pass.”

— Cormac McCarthy

402. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

405. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

407. “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

408. “Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep.”

— Cormac McCarthy

409. “The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

411. “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

412. “There seemed insufficient substance to him to be the object of men’s wrath. There seemed nothing about him sufficient to fuel any enterprise at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

413. “The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.”

— Cormac McCarthy

414. “And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly.”

— Cormac McCarthy

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “I guess you ought to be careful about cussin the dead. I would say at the least there probably ain’t no luck in it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

419. “Like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse.”

— Cormac McCarthy

420. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

422. “Snowflake. You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you don’t have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back.”

— Cormac McCarthy

423. “Do you carry a gun? No. I own one. You think I should carry it? Statistically it will shorten your life, not lengthen it. The unpleasant truth is that if someone is trying to kill you there is not a whole lot you can do about it. Your only real safety would be in disappearing. And even with that there are no guarantees.”

— Cormac McCarthy

424. “The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a reason.”

— Cormac McCarthy

425. “This is a thirsty country.”

— Cormac McCarthy

426. “The boy was sitting quietly on the bunk, still wrapped in the blanket, watching. The man thought he had probably not fully committed himself to any of this. You could wake in the dark wet woods at any time.”

— Cormac McCarthy

427. “The subject was war. The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black. The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said.”

— Cormac McCarthy

428. “All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”

— Cormac McCarthy

429. “The faint light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot.”

— Cormac McCarthy

430. “This is a dog. He is dead too. This.”

— Cormac McCarthy

431. “The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”

— Cormac McCarthy

432. “The skiff swung gently, drifting in the current. He undid his shirt to the waist and put one forearm to his eyes. He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face.”

— Cormac McCarthy

433. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

435. “Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

436. “A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.”

— Cormac McCarthy

437. “He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up at last by the very void to which we wished to stand opposed.”

— Cormac McCarthy

438. “A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.”

— Cormac McCarthy

439. “You might change your mind about what you hate to leave, he said.”

— Cormac McCarthy

440. “Housecats is smart too. Smarter’n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain’t on account of you cain’t learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won’t learn nothin. They too smart.”

— Cormac McCarthy

441. “I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

442. “The facade of the building bore an array of saints in their niches and they had been shot up by American troops trying their rifles, the figures shorn of ears and noses and darkly mottled with leadmarks oxidized upon the stone.”

— Cormac McCarthy

443. “The kid looked at the man. His head was strangely narrow and his hair was plastered up with mud in a bizarre and primitive coiffure. On his forehead were burned the letters H T and lower and almost between the eyes the letter F and these markings were splayed and garish as if the iron had been left too long. When he turned to look at the kid the kid could see that he had no ears.”

— Cormac McCarthy

444. “The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you’ve got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death.”

— Cormac McCarthy

445. “A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.”

— Cormac McCarthy

446. “What loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peeled, blue and bulbous and palely luminescent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I.”

— Cormac McCarthy

447. “God made this world, but he didn’t make it to suit everybody, did he?”

— Cormac McCarthy

448. “He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again.”

— Cormac McCarthy

449. “They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship’s wake.”

— Cormac McCarthy

450. “Suttree ducked the yardlong coil of dead flies that hung from the ceiling and came to the counter with his purchases.”

— Cormac McCarthy