Top 500 Cormac McCarthy Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “No one spoke. There was none to curse and none to pray, we just watched.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “I think sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all.”

— Cormac McCarthy

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

412. “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

413. “This is a thirsty country.”

— Cormac McCarthy

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

423. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

434. “In this world the mask is what is true.”

— Cormac McCarthy

435. “Ich kann nicht anders.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

437. “There ain’t no law in Mexico. It’s just a pack of rogues.”

— Cormac McCarthy

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Cormac McCarthy

441. “What you wants with these goats anyway? Little or nothin. Good fresh milk. God’s best cheese. You have any other animals? said Suttree. Dog or anything? No. Just goats. I think a feller gets started with goats he just more or less sticks to goats.”

— Cormac McCarthy

442. “He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Cormac McCarthy

444. “What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man’s jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?”

— Cormac McCarthy

445. “It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.”

— Cormac McCarthy

446. “Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said.”

— Cormac McCarthy

447. “To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.”

— Cormac McCarthy

448. “All through the long dusk.”

— 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. “There’s a kind of man that when he cant have what he wants he wont take the next best thing but the worst he can find.”

— Cormac McCarthy