Top 150 Robert R. McCammon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls.”

— Robert R. McCammon

2. “There is nothing more frightening or exciting than a blank piece of paper. Frightening because you’re on your own, leaving dark tracks across that snowy plain, and exciting because no one knows your destination but yourself, and even you can’t say exactly where you’ll end up.”

— Robert R. McCammon

3. “We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a passing train...”

— Robert R. McCammon

4. “Don’t be in a hurry to grow up. Hold on to being a boy as long as you can, because once you lose that magic, you’re always begging to find it again.”

— Robert R. McCammon

5. “No one ever grows up. They may look grown-up, but it’s a disguise. It’s just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. They still would like to jump and play, but that heavy clay won’t let them...”

— Robert R. McCammon

6. “I believe music is the language of youth, and the more you can accept as being valid, the younger your attitude gets.”

— Robert R. McCammon

7. “My hometown was full of heroes and villains, honest people who knew the beauty of truth and others whose beauty was a lie. My hometown was probably a lot like yours.”

— Robert R. McCammon

8. “Even the most worthless thing in the world can be beautiful, it just takes the right touch.”

— Robert R. McCammon

9. “We come from darkness, and to darkness we must return.”

— Robert R. McCammon

10. “Maybe crazy is what they call anybody who’s got magic in them after they’re no longer a child.”

— Robert R. McCammon

11. “When you look at something, don’t just look. See it. Really, really see it. See it so when you write it down, somebody else can see it, too.”

— Robert R. McCammon

12. “It was hell’s season, and the air smelled of burning children.”

— Robert R. McCammon

13. “I understood then what courage is all about. It is loving someone else more than you love yourself.”

— Robert R. McCammon

14. “Yes, there was music after all. The sound of the swamp rose up to him. The sound of frogs and crickets, of birds and ’gators, of life in every puddle and pond and knothole and leaf. I Travel By Night.”

— Robert R. McCammon

15. “To my mother, the world was a vast quilt whose stitches were always coming undone. Her worrying somehow worked like a needle, tightening those dangerous seams. If she could imagine events through to their worst tragedy, then she seemed to have some kind of control over them.”

— Robert R. McCammon

16. “You aim for one place, sure as an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you.”

— Robert R. McCammon

17. “The Golden Apples of the Sun, by a writer named Ray Bradbury.”

— Robert R. McCammon

18. “Friends. They really know how to knock you off your pedestal, don’t they?”

— Robert R. McCammon

19. “Once upon a time, man had a love affair with fire.”

— Robert R. McCammon

20. “Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you ‘sir.’ It just happens.”

— Robert R. McCammon

21. “There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we’re the masters of our domain, and that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light.”

— Robert R. McCammon

22. “Because if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world.” His voice cracked a little on the last word.”

— Robert R. McCammon

23. “It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.”

— Robert R. McCammon

24. “But here’s the thing: none of us deserve anything. That’s an illusion we all exist under.”

— Robert R. McCammon

25. “But life is just as much pain and mess as it is joy and order. Probably a lot more mess than order, too.”

— Robert R. McCammon

26. “Many times you will fail. That is the nature of the world, and the truth of life. But when you find your horse again, will go back or will you go forward?”

— Robert R. McCammon

27. “After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation.”

— Robert R. McCammon

28. “They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end.”

— Robert R. McCammon

29. “I imagine you could take the most innocent song ever written and hear the devil speaking in it, if that’s what your mind told you to listen for. Songs that say something about the world and about the people in it – people who are fraught with sins and complications just like the best of us – can be especially cursed, because to some folks truth is a hurtful thing.”

— Robert R. McCammon

30. “This was turning out to be the greatest game he’d ever played.”

— Robert R. McCammon

31. “Death cannot be known. It cannot be befriended. If Death were a boy, he would be a lonely figure, standing at the playground’s edge while the air rippled with other children’s laughter. If Death were a boy, he would walk alone. He would speak in a whisper and his eyes would be haunted by knowledge no human can bear.”

— Robert R. McCammon

32. “All hate does is breed more hate.”

— Robert R. McCammon

33. “I realized all prisons were not buildings of gray rock bordered by guard towers and barbed wire. Some prisons were houses whose closed blinds let no sunlight enter. Some prisons were cages of fragile bones, and some prisons had bars of red polka dots. In fact, you could never tell what might be a prison until you’d had a glimpse of what was seized and bound inside.”

— Robert R. McCammon

34. “Seems to me if a person loses the past, he can’t find the future either.”

— Robert R. McCammon

35. “There is nothing more cruel in this world than a young savage with a chip on his shoulder and anger in his soul.”

— Robert R. McCammon

36. “There are things much worse than monster movies. There are horrors that burst the bounds of screen and page, and come home all twisted up and grinning behind the face of somebody you love.”

— Robert R. McCammon

37. “If a person’s gotta die, he oughta die tryin’ to go home to somebody he loves, don’t you think?”

— Robert R. McCammon

38. “We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, you step beyond who you are and where you are.”

— Robert R. McCammon

39. “Twas said better to light a candle than curse the dark...”

— Robert R. McCammon

40. “Wearily, she sat up. Jesus was not coming today. She would have to die later, she decided. There was no use lying out here like a fool in the rain. One step, she thought. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.”

— Robert R. McCammon

41. “A ninety-two-year-old man has to open a lot of locks to recall a day when he was nine years old.”

— Robert R. McCammon

42. “The evening crept up, as evenings will. In the fading purple twilight, with the last bold artist’s stroke of red sun painting the bellies of clouds across the western horizon, Matthew took a lantern and went walking.”

— Robert R. McCammon

43. “That’s one problem about relating events in first person. The reader knows the narrator didn’t get killed.”

— Robert R. McCammon

44. “Johnny James was sitting on the front porch, sipping from a glass of gasoline in the December heat, when the doom-screamer came.”

— Robert R. McCammon

45. “There was a small noise – a snake’s hiss, perhaps – and the cup clamped tightly as the heated air within compressed itself. An instant after the hideous contact was made, Woodward cried out around the sassafras root and his body shivered in a spasm of pure, animal pain.”

— Robert R. McCammon

46. “The Lady turned to face us. “Ain’t no way out but up,” she said. “Readin’. Writin’. Thinkin’. Those are the rungs on the ladder that lead up and out. Not whinin’ and takin’ and bein’ a mind-chained slave.”

— Robert R. McCammon

47. “I don’t – ” “Understand,” the Lady finished for her. “I know you don’t. Sometimes I don’t either. But I know the language of pain, Miz Mackenson. I grew up speakin’ it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

48. “My father could throw up a fistful of dice to make a decision, but my mother had an agony for every hour. I guess they balanced, as two people who love each other should.”

— Robert R. McCammon

49. “The thing about pain is, it teaches you humility.”

— Robert R. McCammon

50. “No doubt about it, summer was on the wane. The mornings seemed a shade cooler. The nights were hungry, and ate more daylight.”

— Robert R. McCammon