Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

418. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

420. “He is dancing, dancing. He says he’ll never die.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

423. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

425. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

428. “Maybe hope springs eternal in the whale’s heart too. I don’t know. If you look at the history of species there seems to be no selective advantage to intelligence. It’s the microbes who have totally ignored selection for three and a half billion years that remain with us and probably will remain. They seem almost immortal. The process of evolution appears to be about specialization and adaptation and yet these are the very things that seem ultimately to mediate against survival itself.”

— Cormac McCarthy

429. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

434. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

Featured in: Country Quotes

436. “Most people’ll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They cant wait to see him.”

— Cormac McCarthy

437. “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

438. “The task of the narrator is not an easy one, he said. He appears to be required to choose his tale from among the many that are possible. But of course that is not the case. The case is rather to make many of the one.”

— Cormac McCarthy

439. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

442. “All progressions from a higher to lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe.”

— Cormac McCarthy

443. “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

444. “This is a thirsty country.”

— Cormac McCarthy

445. “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

446. “Where he walked the tideline at dusk the last red reaches of the sun flared slowly out along the sky to the west and the tidepools stood like spills of blood. He stopped to look back at his bare footprints. Filling with water one by one. The reefs seemed to move slowly in the last hours and the late colors of the sun drained away and then the sudden darkness fell like a foundry shutting down for the night.”

— Cormac McCarthy

447. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

450. “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