Top 150 Robert R. McCammon Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “This is where I think the writing started. The “righting,” if you will. The righting of circumstances, the shaping of the world the way it should have been, had God not had crossed eyes and buck teeth. In the real world I had no power; in my world I was Hercules unchained.”

— Robert R. McCammon

52. “I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about “grace.” I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

53. “To my mother, the world was a vast quilt whose stitches were always coming undone.”

— Robert R. McCammon

54. “SPIIIIIDERS!” The world ceased its turning. The owl went dumb. The Milky Way flickered on the verge of extinction. Ben hollered it again: “Spiders!” He started thrashing wildly amid the pine needles. “They’re all over me!”

— Robert R. McCammon

55. “Matthew fell on his belly, the pain in his ribs making him curl up like a stomped worm.”

— Robert R. McCammon

56. “It was like carrying a rabbit’s foot or throwing salt over your shoulder if you happened to spill any; these things were part of the grain and texture of life, and better to do them than not, just in case God’s ways were more mysterious than we Christians could grasp.”

— Robert R. McCammon

57. “We all three were struck with the kind of horror that makes you want to dig a hole, jump in, and pull the hole in after you.”

— Robert R. McCammon

58. “Boys want to hurry up and be men, and then comes a day they wish they could be boys again. But I’ll tell you a secret, Cory. Want to hear it?” I nodded. “No one,” Mrs. Neville whispered, “ever grows up.”

— Robert R. McCammon

59. “Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly.”

— Robert R. McCammon

60. “The Basement was an underground shelter in Delaware where the first lady, the president’s seventeen-year-old son, ranking cabinet members and staff people would – they hoped – be protected from all but a direct hit by a one-megaton nuclear warhead.”

— Robert R. McCammon

61. “You know, no mistake in the world can’t be fixed. All it takes is wantin’ to fix it. Sometimes it’s hard, though. Sometimes it hurts to fix a mistake, but you have to do it no matter what.”

— Robert R. McCammon

62. “The color reminded Josh of what the summer sky had looked like when he himself was a child, with all the tomorrows before him and no place to go in any particular hurry.”

— Robert R. McCammon

63. “You see, it’s a girl’s life, too.”

— Robert R. McCammon

64. “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

65. “Don’t think too hard,” she cautioned me. “Sometimes thinking gets in the way of doing.”

— Robert R. McCammon

66. “It’s funny, sometimes, when you look at the people who brought you into this world and you see yourself so clearly in them.”

— Robert R. McCammon

67. “Dear sweet Jesus, come down in your flying saucer and take me with you!”

— Robert R. McCammon

68. “Sometimes thinking gets in the way of doing.”

— Robert R. McCammon

69. “My lip healed. So did my head. My pride stayed bruised, though, and my confidence was fractured. Those injuries, the ones that didn’t show, I would have to live with.”

— Robert R. McCammon

70. “Swan was approaching, trying to run but being thrown off balance by the weight of her head.”

— Robert R. McCammon

71. “Writer? Author? Storyteller, that’s what I decided to be.”

— Robert R. McCammon

72. “But my parents had taught me that everybody deserved respect, no matter if they were pansies or not, and to tell the truth, I was nothing to write home about in the physical looks department.”

— Robert R. McCammon

73. “It was certainly a miracle that they were still alive, and a corpse that could sit up and speak was not something you saw every day.”

— Robert R. McCammon

74. “Josh Hutchins’s battered old Pontiac gave a wheeze like an old man with phlegm in his lungs.”

— Robert R. McCammon

75. “The thing about adults is, when you want them to pay attention to you and intervene, their minds are worlds away; when you want them to be worlds away, they’re sitting on the back of your neck.”

— Robert R. McCammon

76. “Love strong and true can get you through a lot of dookey. And I’m here to tell you, honey, you got to walk through many fields of dookey to get to be my age.”

— Robert R. McCammon

77. “You don’t have to come here to see them, Cory. Or to see me, either. You really don’t. You don’t have to leave what is, to visit what was.”

— Robert R. McCammon

78. “He had turned nine only six days ago, but now he felt very old because Papa wasn’t home yet and those fire-demons were laughing.”

— Robert R. McCammon

79. “I wanted no souvenirs of tragedy.”

— Robert R. McCammon

80. “Josh was beginning to believe the whole thing was like professional wrestling: the superpowers put on their masks and stomped around, roaring threats and swinging wildly at each other, but it was a game of macho, strutting bluff.”

— Robert R. McCammon

81. “New York is not a town constrained by a bedtime, sir.”

— Robert R. McCammon

82. “God A’mighty, what’s the point of livin’ if you don’t fight for what you hold dear?”

— Robert R. McCammon

83. “It was a feeling in the crisp twilight air; it was a hush across the hills. The ghosts were gathering themselves, building up their strength to wander the fields of October and speak to those who would listen.”

— Robert R. McCammon

84. “Everything is born and dies. That is life.”

— Robert R. McCammon

85. “In later years I would think that no woman’s lips had ever been as red as that bike. No low-slung foreign sports car with wire wheels and purring engine would ever look as powerful or as capable as that bike. No chrome would ever gleam with such purity, like the silver moon on a summer’s night.”

— Robert R. McCammon

86. “But Sister’s bag was there like a shield, and the dagger punched through but couldn’t penetrate a frozen turkey dinner.”

— Robert R. McCammon

87. “Death had come in the night. And stripped bare everyone and everything but him.”

— Robert R. McCammon

88. “You just give folks a key, and they can rightly open their own locks.”

— Robert R. McCammon

89. “That’s where they make the books by the hundreds of thousands, and each one is a child different and special and some walk tall and some are crippled, but they all go out into the world from there.”

— Robert R. McCammon

90. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t fight when he had to, it was just that he knew when to fight and when not to fight.”

— Robert R. McCammon

91. “There was lightning behind Mr. Sayre’s eyes, and it was looking for a place to strike.”

— Robert R. McCammon

92. “But some good sense you listen to, and some good sense you can’t live with.”

— Robert R. McCammon

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

— Robert R. McCammon

94. “And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.”

— Robert R. McCammon

95. “I popped the last Tylenol about three days before the bombs hit. A poem I was writing fell to pieces.”

— Robert R. McCammon

96. “The man don’t find Satan. Satan finds the man.”

— Robert R. McCammon

97. “God has a sense of humor that gets my goat sometimes.”

— Robert R. McCammon

98. “I want to be a child again, he thought as the other men at the table looked at him. Dear God, I don’t want to be at the controls anymore!”

— Robert R. McCammon

99. “I learned at an early age that outsized egos can destroy whatever they touch, and often stupid people stand in the way of any kind of creativity.”

— Robert R. McCammon

100. “It hit me who they were talking about. Mrs. Neville. My Mrs. Neville. The teacher who’d said I should enter the short-story contest this year. Good-bye, she’d said as I’d left her room on the first day of summer. Not see you next year or see you in September, but a firm and final good-bye. She must’ve known she was dying, as she sat behind that desk in summer’s light, and she had known that for her there would be no new class of grinning young monkeys in September.”

— Robert R. McCammon