Top 150 Robert R. McCammon Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I think everybody has some eagle and some snake in them; they fight to pull your spirit high or drag it to the ground. The question is: which one do you let win, and at what price?”

— Robert R. McCammon

102. “Trouble is, at my age, most all my dreams are reruns.”

— Robert R. McCammon

103. “If black people occupied the same heaven as white people, what was the point of eating in different cafes here on earth? If black people and white people walked in heaven together, did that mean we were smarter or more stupid than God because on earth we shunned each other?”

— Robert R. McCammon

104. “Hans?” The president’s voice was as soft as a child’s. “If... if you were God... would you destroy this world?” Hannan didn’t respond for a moment. Then, “I suppose... I’d wait and watch. If I were God, I mean.” “Wait and watch for what?” “To find out who wins. The good guys or the bad guys.” “Is there a difference anymore?”

— Robert R. McCammon

105. “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

106. “I don’t believe there can be any bad taste in creating a scene, only badwriting in handling it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

107. “I have been blessed, to be able to create characters and worlds out of whole cloth. Writer? Author? How about storyteller?”

— Robert R. McCammon

108. “Those who babble the Lord’s Prayer day and night would be the first to grin when I’m set afire.”

— Robert R. McCammon

109. “TWAS SAID better to light a candle than to curse the dark, but in the town of New York in the summer of 1702 one might do both, for the candles were small and the dark was large. True, there were the town-appointed constables and watchmen.”

— Robert R. McCammon

110. “It seemed to me that there were two worlds: one before the sun, and one after. And if that were true, then maybe there were people who were citizens of those different worlds as well. Some moved easily through the landscape of night, and others clung to the bright hours.”

— Robert R. McCammon

111. “It’s not right,” he said, “to hate somethin’ just for bein’ alive.”

— Robert R. McCammon

112. “So before long we had a sensible fire going, the firepit rimmed with stones as my dad had told me to do, and by its ruddy light we three frontiersmen ate the sandwiches our mothers had made.”

— Robert R. McCammon

113. “Don’t you go through a day without remembering something of it, and tucking that memory away like a treasure. Because it is.”

— Robert R. McCammon

114. “Both of my grandfathers had voices like bullfrogs battling in a swamp pond.”

— Robert R. McCammon

115. “I guess you never know what a person can do until that person has to do it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

116. “Johnny ate encyclopedias like any other kid might eat Red Hots or Lemonheads.”

— Robert R. McCammon

117. “It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication – whether it’s TV, movies, or books – begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. 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. The.”

— Robert R. McCammon

118. “Sheer terror has no voice.”

— Robert R. McCammon

119. “But who ever said everybody gets a happy ending?”

— Robert R. McCammon

120. “It had been a joyful day for frogs and mud hens. For the human breed, however, the low gray clouds and chill rain coiled chains around the soul.”

— Robert R. McCammon

121. “Rain fell on the roofs of the just and the unjust, the saints and the sinners, those who knew peace and those in torment, and tomorrow began at a dark hour.”

— Robert R. McCammon

122. “His hair was think and curly and reddish-brown, his eyes a clear ice blue; Ramona had told him many times that she could see the sky in them, clouds when he was angry and rain when he was sad. Now, if she had looked into his eyes closely enough, she might’ve seen the approaching storm.”

— Robert R. McCammon

123. “On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books – Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four. There are Boy’s Life magazines, dozens of issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Screen Thrills, and Popular Mechanics. There is a yellow wall of National Geographics, and I have to blush and say I know where all the African pictures are.”

— Robert R. McCammon

124. “If... if you were God... would you destroy this world?” Hannan.”

— Robert R. McCammon

125. “Who on this earth can know where they’re going, unless they have a map of where they’ve been?”

— Robert R. McCammon

126. “You never know how things are gonna turn out, though, and that’s the truth. You aim for one place, sure as an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you. I don’t believe I ever met one person who became what they wanted to be when they were your age.”

— Robert R. McCammon

127. “Hey, listen here!” She strode toward their booth on her chunky legs, her cheeks reddening.”

— Robert R. McCammon

128. “It’s the curse of man to have a mind and not have the sense to use it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

129. “Life and Death were part of the same puzzle, part of the same strange and miraculous process of growth.”

— Robert R. McCammon

130. “I have lived,” she said in her clear, strong voice, “a hundred lifetimes, and I’m not dead yet.”

— Robert R. McCammon

131. “All us kids had found out by now that all teachers had a sore spot; some went crazy over gum chewing, others insane over behind-the-back giggles, still others nuts over the repeated squeaking and scuffing of shoes on the linoleum. Machine-gun coughs, donkeylike snorts, a fusillade of throat clearing, spitballs stuck to the blackboard: all these were arsenals in the battle against Hitlerian teachers. Who knows?”

— Robert R. McCammon

132. “I judge God, or the power that we know as God, to be very, very weak. A dying candle, if you like, surrounded by darkness. And the darkness is closing in.”

— Robert R. McCammon

133. “What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth?”

— Robert R. McCammon

134. “Bein’ used to somethin’,” Davy Ray answered, “is not the same as likin’ it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

135. “He felt, though, that if love was the desire to possess someone, it was in reality the poor substance of self-love. It seemed to him that a greater, truer love was the desire to open a cage – be it made of iron bars or the bones of tormented injustice – and set the nightbird free.”

— Robert R. McCammon

136. “After a few minutes he looked back and saw the derricks of St. Nasty receding against the violet-streaked sky. Then he looked forward again, toward whatever lay ahead.”

— Robert R. McCammon

137. “I had discovered that being a writer gave you a lot of license to fiddle with the truth, but I’d better not get into the habit of it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

138. “Tell me. What is the point of life, if truth is not worth standing up for? If justice is a hollow shell? If beauty and grace are burnt to ashes, and evil rejoices in the flames? Shall I weep on that day, and lose my mind, or join the rejoicing and lose my soul? Shall I sit in my room? Should I go for a long walk, but where might I go so as not to smell the smoke? Should I just go on, Mrs. Nettles, like everyone else?”

— Robert R. McCammon

139. “I never knew what hate really was until I thought of somebody wrapping up a bomb and putting it in a church on a Sunday morning to kill little girls.”

— Robert R. McCammon

140. “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. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age.”

— Robert R. McCammon

141. “The young man’s eyes were red-rimmed, his gaunt face strained by whatever inner demons were torturing him.”

— Robert R. McCammon

142. “There are many things a boy considers beautiful: the shine of a bike’s paint, the luster of a dog’s pelt, the singing of a yo-yo as it loops the loop, the yellow harvest moon, the green grass of a meadow, and free hours at hand. The face of a girl, no matter how well-constructed, is usually not in that realm of appreciation.”

— Robert R. McCammon

143. “Do you... do you love me?” “Like a mirror,” Friend answered.”

— Robert R. McCammon

144. “That had been close, she thought. The demons almost got me! But glory be to Jesus, and when he arrives in his flying saucer from the planet Jupiter I’ll be there on the golden shore to kiss his hand!”

— Robert R. McCammon

145. “Bedlam,” Matthew said. The term for insane asylums had been used for many years, and originated in the clamor and ravings of the mad persons locked within.”

— Robert R. McCammon

146. “This was supposed to be enjoyable, Matthew thought grimly. Berry had taught him the positions and steps last week, but with the fiddling and the drumming and Gilliam Vincent’s stick poised to strike a blow for artful perfection.”

— Robert R. McCammon

147. “But he’d looked into her eyes and seen forgiveness, and he could not stand up to such a thing. Forgiveness, even for him.”

— Robert R. McCammon

148. “She looked like the daughter of a marriage between ice and fire.”

— Robert R. McCammon

149. “He said he was between jobs, but that he was goin’ back into the business of settlin’ accounts.” Matthew thought that over. It meant something, certainly. But what?”

— Robert R. McCammon

150. “Sometimes you can see a person’s inside face – but only for a second or two – if you look close and hard enough. The eyes give away the inside face, and likely as not it’s a whole lot different than the mask that’s stuck on the outside.”

— Robert R. McCammon