Cormac McCarthy Quotes
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Cormac McCarthy Quotes

Cormac McCarthy found success as an American writer, playwright, and screenwriter. His writings embraced the darkest sides of human nature while exploring the Western, Southern Gothic, and Post-apocalyptic genres. Among his famous work includes The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and came on the big screen in 2009. Aside from his award-winning novels, Cormac McCarthy himself became a source of words of wisdom, and numerous quotes lived because of him.

Here is a collection of Cormac McCarthy quotes involving various topics in life, some of which were from his novels.

Table of Contents

The Road Cormac McCarthy Quotes

The Road brought McCarthy the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007, proving its insightful yet dark theme. The novel explores the heartbreaking survival story of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic society where nobody and nowhere is safe. Concepts on faith, survival, death and hope subtly played throughout the book, and its writing captured numerous quotable moments to remember.

Here is a list of quotes by Cormac McCarthy from his novel, The Road.

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

– Cormac McCarthy

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

– Cormac McCarthy

There is no God and we are his prophets.

– Cormac McCarthy

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

– Cormac McCarthy

If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.

– Cormac McCarthy

Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

– Cormac McCarthy

When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.

– Cormac McCarthy

If only my heart were stone.

– Cormac McCarthy

If you break little promises, you’ll break big ones.

– Cormac McCarthy

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.

– Cormac McCarthy

Where men can’t live gods fare no better.

– Cormac McCarthy

How does the never to be differ from what never was?

– Cormac McCarthy

Dark of the invisible moon. The night now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

– Cormac McCarthy

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.

– Cormac McCarthy

When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

– Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

– Cormac McCarthy

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

– Cormac McCarthy

When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

– Cormac McCarthy

You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were.

– Cormac McCarthy

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

– Cormac McCarthy

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said.

– Cormac McCarthy

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.

– Cormac McCarthy

Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?

– Cormac McCarthy

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

– Cormac McCarthy

Each the others world entire.

– Cormac McCarthy

When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?

– Cormac McCarthy

When you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

– Cormac McCarthy

The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

– Cormac McCarthy

He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is.

– Cormac McCarthy

The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.

– Cormac McCarthy

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

– Cormac McCarthy

What’s the bravest thing you ever did? He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

– Cormac McCarthy

Carry the fire.

– Cormac McCarthy

The wind sounded of Mother Earth’s forsaken and abandoned cries.

– Cormac McCarthy

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief.

– Cormac McCarthy

Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, Oh God.

– Cormac McCarthy

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.

– Cormac McCarthy

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.

– Cormac McCarthy

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.

– Cormac McCarthy

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

– Cormac McCarthy

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

– Cormac McCarthy

Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

– Cormac McCarthy

As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. 

– Cormac McCarthy

Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

– Cormac McCarthy

Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

– Cormac McCarthy

You say you can’t? Then don’t do it. That’s all.

– Cormac McCarthy

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.

– Cormac McCarthy

The hundred nights they’d sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall

– Cormac McCarthy

Where you’ve nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air, and breathe upon them.

– Cormac McCarthy

Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

– Cormac McCarthy

In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

– Cormac McCarthy

He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death

– Cormac McCarthy

This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.

– Cormac McCarthy

We’re carrying the fire.

– Cormac McCarthy

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.
I don’t guess you would know it. You’d just be it.

– Cormac McCarthy

That the boy was all that stood between him and death.

– Cormac McCarthy

The frailty of everything, revealed at last.

– Cormac McCarthy

When we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too.

– Cormac McCarthy

There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

– Cormac McCarthy

That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.

– Cormac McCarthy

In the night’s in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.

– Cormac McCarthy

Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

– Cormac McCarthy

With the final onset of dark the iron cold locked down and the boy by now was shuddering violently. No moon rose beyond the murk and there was nowhere to go.

– Cormac McCarthy

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.

– Cormac McCarthy

The breath of God was his yet, though it pass from man to man through all of time.

– Cormac McCarthy

They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold.

– Cormac McCarthy

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

– Cormac McCarthy

The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be.

– Cormac McCarthy

There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.

– Cormac McCarthy

His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep.

– Cormac McCarthy

If you break little promises you’ll break big ones. That’s what you said.

– Cormac McCarthy

If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.

– Cormac McCarthy

The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.

– Cormac McCarthy

He had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance.

– Cormac McCarthy

In the nights sometimes now he’d wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

– Cormac McCarthy

The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale.

– Cormac McCarthy

The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark of the yard like a grave yawning at judgement day in some old apocalyptic painting.

– Cormac McCarthy

They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

– Cormac McCarthy

The snow whispered down in the stillness and the sparks rose and dimmed and died in the eternal blackness.

– Cormac McCarthy

The shape of the city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.

– Cormac McCarthy

In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like heathen candles.

– Cormac McCarthy

In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.

– Cormac McCarthy

They struggled forever in the roads cold coagulate.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

– Cormac McCarthy

The boy’s candlecolored skin was all but translucent.

– Cormac McCarthy

Tell us where the world went.

– Cormac McCarthy

Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease.

– Cormac McCarthy

You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

– Cormac McCarthy

His dreams brightened. The vanished world returned.

– Cormac McCarthy

There was light all about him.

– Cormac McCarthy

Even if you knew what to do you wouldn’t know what to do. You wouldn’t know if you wanted to do it or not.

– Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian Quotes

McCarthy released the epic Western novel Blood Meridian in 1985. The story revolves around a young runaway referred to as “the kid” and his experiences with the Glanton gang. This historical group involves outlaws and scalp-hunters who massacred Indians, aboriginal Americans, and others from the Texas-Mexico borderlands during the late 1840s for bounty, pleasure, and eventually as a habit. Although violence and suffering manifested in the novel, McCarthy’s magnificent writing style and depiction of a crucial period of American history were no doubt praiseworthy by critics. Hence, the following quotes by Cormac McCarthy from the mentioned book proved its status as one of the greatest American novels of all time.

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

– Cormac McCarthy

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures.

– Cormac McCarthy

Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

– Cormac McCarthy

You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

– Cormac McCarthy

A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.

– Cormac McCarthy

They were watching, out there past men’s knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

– Cormac McCarthy

That man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

– Cormac McCarthy

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

– Cormac McCarthy

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.

– Cormac McCarthy

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification.

– Cormac McCarthy

War is god.

– Cormac McCarthy

War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.

– Cormac McCarthy

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

– Cormac McCarthy

Men are born for games. Nothing else.

– Cormac McCarthy

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

– Cormac McCarthy

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

– Cormac McCarthy

War is the truest form of divination.

– Cormac McCarthy

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.

– Cormac McCarthy

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible.

– Cormac McCarthy

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

– Cormac McCarthy

They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.

– Cormac McCarthy

If a man’s at odds to know his own mind it’s because he hasn’t got aught but his mind to know it with.

– Cormac McCarthy

Here beyond men’s judgments all covenants were brittle.

– Cormac McCarthy

I was afraid I was going to die and then I was afraid I wasn’t.

– Cormac McCarthy

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.

– Cormac McCarthy

You can’t be all Mexican. It’s like being all mongrel.

– Cormac McCarthy

Men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

– Cormac McCarthy

Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.

– Cormac McCarthy

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

– Cormac McCarthy

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it.

– Cormac McCarthy

The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.

– Cormac McCarthy

They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps of love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans.

– Cormac McCarthy

Wrinkle not thy sable brow at me, my friend. All will be known to you at last. To you as to every man.

– Cormac McCarthy

The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some great fire at the earth’s end.

– Cormac McCarthy

Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?

– Cormac McCarthy

Bears that dance, bears that don’t.

– Cormac McCarthy

And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys.

– Cormac McCarthy

I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don’t wake up forever.

– Cormac McCarthy

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak

– Cormac McCarthy

he gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself.

– Cormac McCarthy

If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.

– Cormac McCarthy

This is a terrible place to die in. Where’s a good one?

– Cormac McCarthy

They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers.

– Cormac McCarthy

For this will to deceive that is in thing luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies

– Cormac McCarthy

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less

– Cormac McCarthy

Child of God Cormac McCarthy Quotes

Child of God was McCarthy’s third novel, released in 1973. The story takes place in Tennessee and depicts the life of a young social outcast named Lester Ballard, who displayed violent tendencies. He eventually became a perverted madman and serial killer, descending into necrophilia and increasingly performing evil deeds. Aside from its violent nature, it also touched the horrors of human nature, extreme isolation, survival, and moral degradation of humans.

McCarthy’s novel Child of God once again demonstrated his unique writing style. Moreover, the notable quotes below by Cormac McCarthy from the novel found their way to fascinate today’s generation.

Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.

– Cormac McCarthy

Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them.

– Cormac McCarthy

White pussy is nothin but trouble.

– Cormac McCarthy

He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought.

– Cormac McCarthy

In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.

– Cormac McCarthy

Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity. a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.

– Cormac McCarthy

All patched up out of parts and lowslung and bumping over the ruts. Filled with old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet.

– Cormac McCarthy

His other few possessions lay about in the grotto where chance had arranged them.

– Cormac McCarthy

He sounded like a man with a mouthful of marbles, articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away.

– Cormac McCarthy

A malign star kept him.

– Cormac McCarthy

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.

– Cormac McCarthy

You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.

– Cormac McCarthy

He’d long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outerwear as well. A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape.

– Cormac McCarthy

At the foot of the steps he picked up what appeared to be a wig and saw that it was fashioned whole from a dried human scalp.

– Cormac McCarthy

His own tracks came from the cave bloodred with cavemud and paled across the slope as if the snow had cauterized his feet until he left dry white prints in the snow.

– Cormac McCarthy

The tracks of a fox raised out of the snow intaglio like little mushrooms and berrystains where birds shat crimson mutes upon the snow like blood

– Cormac McCarthy

Children Quotes by Cormac McCarthy

Throughout his career, McCarthy wrote and spoke several statements involving children. Moreover, some of his novels use a juvenile as the main character. His words vary from context to subject, sometimes from his experience, while others from his observations. Regardless, his quotes about children are hard to ignore, as they’re as iconic as the writer himself.

Here is a list of Children Quotes by Cormac McCarthy:

Books Worth Reading:

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

– Cormac McCarthy

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

– Cormac McCarthy

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job.

– Cormac McCarthy

And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.

– Cormac McCarthy

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.

– Cormac McCarthy

He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

– Cormac McCarthy

This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.

– Cormac McCarthy

What could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream

– Cormac McCarthy

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

To have a child when you’re older, it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things, you know, afresh. It forces the world on you. And I think it’s a good thing.

– Cormac McCarthy

I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was… name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.

– Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Dream Quotes

McCarthy used dreams in his novels to grasp the state of mind of his characters. For example, in The Road and McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, dreams became a way for McCarthy to provoke and challenge his readers’ understanding. These dreams influence not only the characters but the readers too, as they follow McCarthy’s narrative and storytelling.

The list below shows the dream quotes by Cormac McCarthy.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

– Cormac McCarthy

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you’re happy again, then you’ll have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up, I won’t let you.

– Cormac McCarthy

What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.

– Cormac McCarthy

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.

– Cormac McCarthy

In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.

– Cormac McCarthy

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I’ve thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.

– Cormac McCarthy

If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?

– Cormac McCarthy

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

– Cormac McCarthy

And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

– Cormac McCarthy

..in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.

– Cormac McCarthy

Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.

– Cormac McCarthy

A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.

– Cormac McCarthy

Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.

– Cormac McCarthy

In dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.

– Cormac McCarthy

War Quotes by Cormac McCarthy

Several novels written by McCarthy subtly shared his insight and knowledge in war. He wasn’t a soldier, but he does know something about the theme, like the Mexican-American war of the late nineteenth century. In particular, he used this information in his novel Blood Meridian, which took place in the aftermath of the mentioned war. On the other hand, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy involves War veteran characters.

Hence, it’s no surprise that the books and words of Cormac McCarthy include war quotes worth reading.

Men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent’s flesh for its bite.

– Cormac McCarthy

He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to holo

– Cormac McCarthy

This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.

– Cormac McCarthy

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.

– Cormac McCarthy

The reverend waited for her to be seated and then he bowed his head and blessed the food and the table and the people sitting at it. He went on at some length and blessed everything all the way up to the country and then he blessed some other countries as well and he spoke about war and famine and the missions and other problems in the world with particular reference to Russia and the jews and cannibalism and he asked it all in Christ’s name amen and raised up and reached for the cornbread. 

– Cormac McCarthy

They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape. Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in the heat like drapery folds.

– Cormac McCarthy

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

– Cormac McCarthy

People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake. We didn’t have nothin to give to em to take over there. If we’d sent em without rifles I dont know as they’d of been all that much worse off. You can’t go to war like that. You cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes. I surely dont.

– Cormac McCarthy

Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

– Cormac McCarthy

I tell you this, as war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? You ain’t nothing.

– Cormac McCarthy

He’d taken up a pallet between Toadvine and another Kentuckian, a veteran of the war. This man had returned to claim some darkeyed love he’d left behind two years before when Doniphan’s command pulled east for Saltillo and the officers had had to drive back hundreds of young girls dressed as boys that took the road behind the army.

– Cormac McCarthy

There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton’s warhorse.

– Cormac McCarthy

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

– Cormac McCarthy

In every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die.

– Cormac McCarthy

When you’re a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be, Billy said. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you just wind up tryin to minimize the pain. Anyway this country aint the same. Nor anything in it. The war changed everthing. I dont think people even know it yet.

– Cormac McCarthy

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

– Cormac McCarthy

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

– Cormac McCarthy

I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don’t wake up forever.

– Cormac McCarthy

Best Cormac McCarthy Book Quotes

From The Orchard Keeper to All The Pretty Horses to The Road, Cormac McCarthy proved his deserved status as one of the masters in the world of literature. His philosophical and dark novels often feature violence in their most explicit forms, making it almost an inseparable theme from McCarthy’s writings. Moreover, he weaved his words into compelling stories to hook its readers to read more.

Books Worth Reading:

McCarthy’s writing style and careful choice of words produced some of the best Western novels of the past decades. Additionally, excerpts from the books of Cormac McCarthy became his best quotes today, none of which aged a bit.

Ninety percent of the time. It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

– Cormac McCarthy

You think … yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count.

– Cormac McCarthy

They pretend to themselves they are in control of events where perhaps they are not.

– Cormac McCarthy

Moss walked out onto the prairie behind the motel with one of the motel pillows under his arm and he wrapped the pillow about the muzzle of the gun and fired off three rounds and then stood there in the cold sunlight watching the feathers drift across the gray chaparral, thinking about his life.

– Cormac McCarthy

People think they know what they want but they generally don’t. Sometimes if they’re lucky they’ll get it anyways. Me I was always lucky. My whole life. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.

– Cormac McCarthy

I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would.

– Cormac McCarthy

Well let’s just take it one day at a time

– Cormac McCarthy

Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this.

– Cormac McCarthy

He said I was bein hard on myself. Said it was a sign of old age.

– Cormac McCarthy

What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal. But he wasn’t nothin’ compared to what was comin’ down the pike.

– Cormac McCarthy

Everything I ever thought has turned out different.

– Cormac McCarthy

The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it.

– Cormac McCarthy

I believe that whatever you do in your life it will get back to you. If you live long enough it will

– Cormac McCarthy

By the time you figured it out it would be too late

– Cormac McCarthy

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not ever’body is goin to get older with you.

– Cormac McCarthy

My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you don’t it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Dont haul stuff around with you.

– Cormac McCarthy

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.

– Cormac McCarthy

You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away.

– Cormac McCarthy

People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don’t deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things

– Cormac McCarthy

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

– Cormac McCarthy

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he’d not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

– Cormac McCarthy

I don’t know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.

– Cormac McCarthy

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.

– Cormac McCarthy

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

– Cormac McCarthy

There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

– Cormac McCarthy

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you.

– Cormac McCarthy

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

– Cormac McCarthy

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

– Cormac McCarthy

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the hearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

– Cormac McCarthy

He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

– Cormac McCarthy

Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.

– Cormac McCarthy

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

– Cormac McCarthy

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.

– Cormac McCarthy

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

– Cormac McCarthy

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.

– Cormac McCarthy

The Crossing Cormac McCarthy Quotes

The second installment of McCarthy’s “The Border” Trilogy, The Crossing, became one of his best novels. The mentioned book catapulted his career, making him one of the highest-grossing American authors of the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s a coming-of-age novel that tells the life of Billy Parham and his family set in the late 1930s and early 1940s along the US-Mexican border. The Crossing touched on themes like death, cruelty between humans, religion, the varied points of view on every person, and focusing on reality. These subjects moved readers to read more, much like every other McCarthy novel.

Of course, Cormac McCarthy successfully delivered noteworthy statements and quotes from The Crossing, and that includes the following:

Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.

– Cormac McCarthy

So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

– Cormac McCarthy

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing…

– Cormac McCarthy

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

– Cormac McCarthy

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

– Cormac McCarthy

No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It’s never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?

– Cormac McCarthy

He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.

– Cormac McCarthy

Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.

– Cormac McCarthy

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all

– Cormac McCarthy

Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now

– Cormac McCarthy

He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.

– Cormac McCarthy

The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.

– Cormac McCarthy

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

– Cormac McCarthy

She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.

– Cormac McCarthy

He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?

– Cormac McCarthy

He imagined that in his estate of eternal night he might somehow have already halved the distance to death. That the transition for him could not be so great for the world was already at some certain distance and if it were not death’s terrain he encroached upon in his darkness then whose?

– Cormac McCarthy

Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from.

– Cormac McCarthy

He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied. He said that in his opinion it was imprudent to suppose that the dead have no power to act in the world, for their power is great and their influence often most weighty with just those who suspect it least.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such a value.

– Cormac McCarthy

One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated. Yet wherein does that history lie?

– Cormac McCarthy

..while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out.

– Cormac McCarthy

I was a Mormon. Then I converted to the church. Then I became I dont know what. Then I became me.

– Cormac McCarthy

I think it is better to make a study of smaller things. Then the larger will follow. In smaller things one can progress. There one’s efforts are repaid.

– Cormac McCarthy

The small sands in that waste was all there was for the wind to move and it moved with a constant migratory seething upon itself. As if in its ultimate granulation the world sought some stay against its own eternal wheeling.

– Cormac McCarthy

The lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only.

– Cormac McCarthy

I think the dead have no nationality.

– Cormac McCarthy

Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront. Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.

– Cormac McCarthy

wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot

– Cormac McCarthy

there is no order in the world save that which death has put there.

– Cormac McCarthy

There ain’t but one life worth livin and I was born to it.

– Cormac McCarthy

The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less. 

– Cormac McCarthy

In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased.

– Cormac McCarthy

One thing about me, when I’m wrong I’ll admit it. Well. That’s a good trait to have.

– Cormac McCarthy

In this world the mask is what is true.

– Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses Quotes

McCarthy’s Border Trilogy starts with All the Pretty Horses, published in 1992. The coming-of-age novel became a national bestseller and won several awards like the National Book Critics Circle Award and U.S. National Award. The novel (turned film) follows the story of John Grady Cole, a young cowboy, and his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, as they set off on a journey towards Mexico. It also unfolds the characters’ struggle for independence and recurring themes on man’s relationship with the natural world, fate, loss of innocence, family relationship, violence, death, and more.

All the Pretty Horses displayed McCarthy’s mastery in writing, especially with the way he wrote the following notable quotes:

Books Worth Reading:

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

– Cormac McCarthy

When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group–bacteria, mice, people–and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God–who knows all that can be known–seems powerless to change

– Cormac McCarthy

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

– Cormac McCarthy

By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.

– Cormac McCarthy

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I’d made before it.

– Cormac McCarthy

It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

– Cormac McCarthy

A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They’re always more trouble than what they’re worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.

– Cormac McCarthy

If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.

– Cormac McCarthy

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

– Cormac McCarthy

You either stick or you quit. And I wouldnt quit you I dont care what you done.

– Cormac McCarthy

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

– Cormac McCarthy

Son, not everbody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven.

– Cormac McCarthy

He looked into those blue eyes like a man seeking some vision of the increate future of the universe.

– Cormac McCarthy

It just bothered me that you might think I’m somethin special. I aint.

– Cormac McCarthy

I’d rather to make a good run as a bad stand.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

– Cormac McCarthy

You don’t know shit from apple butter.

– Cormac McCarthy

You think God looks out for people?…I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you’re done there’s wars and ruination and all hell. You don’t know what’s goin to happen. I’d say He’s just about go to. I don’t believe we’d make it a day otherwise.

– Cormac McCarthy

The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that’s probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I’ll tell you what. I’m a long way from bein convinced that it’s all that good a thing.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

– Cormac McCarthy

I don’t see you holdin no aces.

– Cormac McCarthy

I’m double bred for death by fire.

– Cormac McCarthy

We’re like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We don’t know what’s goin to show up here come daylight. We don’t even know what color they’ll be.

– Cormac McCarthy

Beware, gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.

– Cormac McCarthy

I got no reason to be afraid of God. I’ve even got a bone or two to pick with Him

– Cormac McCarthy

I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it.

– Cormac McCarthy

In an ideal world the gossip of the idle would be of no consequence. But I have seen the consequences in the real world and they can be very grave indeed.

– Cormac McCarthy

I despise the wintertime. I never did see what was the use in there even bein one.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

The night was cold and clear and the sparks rising from the fire raced hot and red among the stars.

– Cormac McCarthy

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on.

– Cormac McCarthy

I’ve been at some pains to tell you about myself because among other reasons I think we should know who our enemies are. I’ve known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people.

– Cormac McCarthy

I dont know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all.

– Cormac McCarthy

Buddy when he come back from up in the panhandle told me one time it quit blowin up there and all the chickens fell over.

– Cormac McCarthy

Yet the captain inhabited another space and it was a space of his own election and outside the common world of men.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

– Cormac McCarthy

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

There was nothing along the road save the country it traversed and there was nothing in the country at all.

– Cormac McCarthy

If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune.

– Cormac McCarthy

I’ve no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favor?

– Cormac McCarthy

But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.

– Cormac McCarthy

I began to see how the world must become if I were to live in it.

– Cormac McCarthy

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he’d seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

– Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes On Writing

American novelist and playwright Cormac McCarthy became one of the finest literary voices of today’s generation. His rare on-camera interview and appearances don’t say much about writing. However, some of his words became beneficial for aspiring writers. Moreover, his writings remain significant in the literary society, and writers can still learn a lot from his work.

Here are the quotes on writing by Cormac McCarthy:

Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs.

– Cormac McCarthy

I want, even for the worst of the characters, grace under pressure, some slinking nobility.

– Cormac McCarthy

If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it.

– Cormac McCarthy

In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, ‘The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.’ And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

– Cormac McCarthy

Look, a novel’s a novel and a film’s a film, and they’re very different.

– Cormac McCarthy

You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen.

– Cormac McCarthy

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

– Cormac McCarthy

Creative work is often driven by pain.

– Cormac McCarthy

It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything

– Cormac McCarthy

Things I’ve written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them.

– Cormac McCarthy

I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.

– Cormac McCarthy

The ugly fact is books are made out of books… the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.

– Cormac McCarthy

I never had any doubts about my abilities… I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.

– Cormac McCarthy

If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.

– Cormac McCarthy

I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.

– Cormac McCarthy

Even if what you’re working on doesn’t go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you’re doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.

– Cormac McCarthy

There was never a person born since Adam who’s been luckier than me. Nothing has happened to me that hasn’t been perfect. And I’m not being facetious. There’s never been a time when I was penniless and down, when something wouldn’t arrive. Over and over and over again. Enough to make you superstitious.

– Cormac McCarthy

You can’t plot things out. You just have to trust in, you know, wherever it comes from.

– Cormac McCarthy

You spend a lot of time thinking about how to [write], you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.

– Cormac McCarthy

If it doesn’t concern life and death, it’s not interesting

– Cormac McCarthy

You can’t write good poetry unless you have a soul to express.

– Cormac McCarthy

Writing is rewriting. Someone said easy writing makes for hard reading.

– Cormac McCarthy

I just sit down and write whatever is interesting…  the best things just sort of come out of the blue. It’s a subconscious process. You don’t really know what you’re doing most of the time.

– Cormac McCarthy

Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.

– Cormac McCarthy

The core of literature is the idea of tragedy… You don’t really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

– Cormac McCarthy

Teaching writing is a hustle.

– Cormac McCarthy

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don’t feel that way about it. Sometimes it’s difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think … that’s your signpost and your guide. You’ll never get there, but without it you won’t get anywhere.

– Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men Book Quotes by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy’s 2005 neo-Western novel, No Country for Old Men, follows the interconnected paths of Llewelyn Moss, Anton Chigurh, and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. The story takes place in the vicinity of the Mexico-United States border somewhere in 1980 and involving an illegal drug deal gone wrong. No Country for Old Men‘s central theme was violence. However, it also explored morality, ethics, wealth, subtle presence of greed, free will, war, marriage, making the right choices, and old age. The novel became a film in 2007, winning four Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay.

Although No Country for Old Men received mixed reviews from the public and critics, the following memorable quotes of Cormac McCarthy proved his mastery in the field:

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

– Cormac McCarthy

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.

– Cormac McCarthy

The point is there ain’t no point.

– Cormac McCarthy

How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

– Cormac McCarthy

You keep runnin that mouth and I’m goin to take you back there and screw you.

– Cormac McCarthy

I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.

– Cormac McCarthy

you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain’t nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It’s just a aggravation.

– Cormac McCarthy

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.

– Cormac McCarthy

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

– Cormac McCarthy

All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

– Cormac McCarthy

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

– Cormac McCarthy

I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt.

– Cormac McCarthy

If there’s one thing on this planet you don’t look like it’s a bunch of good luck walkin around.

– Cormac McCarthy

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you’re just too close to it.

– Cormac McCarthy

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

– Cormac McCarthy

I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.

– Cormac McCarthy

It’s not about knowing who you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody’s. You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. Every step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it.

– Cormac McCarthy

This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.

– Cormac McCarthy

What business is it of yours where I’m from, friendo?

– Cormac McCarthy

If you dont respect me what must you think of yourself?

– Cormac McCarthy

People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I dont recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.

– Cormac McCarthy

People don’t pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.

– Cormac McCarthy

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

– Cormac McCarthy

Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.

– Cormac McCarthy

You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

– Cormac McCarthy

Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.

– Cormac McCarthy

I got here the same way the coin did.

– Cormac McCarthy

And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

– Cormac McCarthy

Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.

– Cormac McCarthy

Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.

– Cormac McCarthy

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end.

– Cormac McCarthy

His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.

– Cormac McCarthy

Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m gettin old.

– Cormac McCarthy

You might think you could run away and change your name and I don’t know what all. Start over. And then one mornin’ you wake up and look at the ceilin’ and guess who’s layin’ there?

– Cormac McCarthy

I’ve lot a lot of friends over these last few years. Not all of em older than me neither. One of the things you realize about gettin older is that no everbody is goin to get older with you.

– Cormac McCarthy

If I didnt have her I dont know what I would have. Well, yes I do. You wouldnt need a box to put it in, neither.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

– Cormac McCarthy

I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it’d be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.

– Cormac McCarthy

You can be patriotic and still believe that some things cost more than what they’re worth.

– Cormac McCarthy

There’s two kinds of people that dont ask a lot of questions. One is too dumb to and the other dont need to.

– Cormac McCarthy

There is no description of a fool that you fail to satisfy.

– Cormac McCarthy

Sometimes you have a little problem and you dont fix it and then all of a sudden it aint a little problem anymore.

– Cormac McCarthy

That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash.

– Cormac McCarthy

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everbody is goin to get older with you.

– Cormac McCarthy

It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.

– Cormac McCarthy

There’s too much shit still down the road that I got to deal with. It aint goin to end here.

– Cormac McCarthy

The spotlight kept rowing back and forth across the face of the ridge. Methodically. Bright shuttle, dark loom.

– Cormac McCarthy

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

American novelist Cormac McCarthy was one of the century’s most recognized and celebrated American writers in the industry. He managed to write ten award-winning novels throughout his career, encompassing Post-Apocalyptic and Western genres. His brilliant characterization, creativity, unique writing style captivated readers and writers even in today’s generation. Hence, the quotes of Cormac McCarthy, written or spoken, remain relevant in our time.

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