Cormac Mccarthy Quotes

“He shook his head. You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesn't allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people don't believe that there can be such a person. You see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? 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 there could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?

Yes, she said sobbing. I do. I truly do.

Good, he said. That's good. Then he shot her.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“You shouldnt worry about what people think of you because they dont do it that often”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“And you will never know the depth of your heart until you are presented with the opportunity for revenge. Only then will you know what you are capable of.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor: A Screenplay

“You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you dont have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“The evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Satan is only interested in your soul. He doesnt give a shit about your welfare otherwise.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“The best way to die well is to live well. To die for another would give your death meaning. Ignoring for the time being the fact that the other is going to die anyway.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“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, All the Pretty Horses

“He said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“If there was a heaven, was it not founded upon the writhing bodies of the damned?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Blood. This country is give much blood. This Mexico. This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“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 dierent ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“Cormac McCarthy has to be accounted as a secret master, and the rightful heir (but oh how one hates to invoke yet another Great American Writer in discussing McCarthy, who at times has seemed ot be in danger of disappearing in a heavy snowfall of comparisons to Melville, Faulkner, O'Conner, Hemingway) to the American Gothic tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, dark god of Providence, Rhode Island, where McCarthy was born.”
― Michael Chabon, The Road

“In the mountains they saw deer in the headlights and in the headlights the deer were pale as ghosts and as soundless. They turned their red eyes toward this unreckoned sun and sidled and grouped and leapt the bar ditch by ones and twos. A small doe lost her footing on the macadam and scrabbled wildly and sank onto her hindquarters and rose again and vanished with the others into the chaparral beyond the roadside.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“It was always himself that the coward abandoned first, after this all other betrayals came easily”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“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, The Crossing

“John Grady, de pie ante la ventana del café vacío, observando las actividades de la plaza, dijo que era bueno que Dios ocultase las verdades de la vida a los jóvenes cuando empezaban pues de otro modo no tendrían ánimos para empezar.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Imaginó el dolor del mundo como un parásito informe buscando el calor de las almas humanas donde incubar y creyó saber qué le hacía a uno vulnerable a sus visitas. Lo que no sabía era que no tenía mente y por tanto no podía conocer los límites de aquellas almas y temió que no existieran límites.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Most people'll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They cant wait to see him.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“But those words liveoak, pine, the somehow onomatopoeic splendor [sic] of magnolia, still flower greenly in the mind before McCarthy crushes them, and that leaf, which if ash must weigh very little, still lies heavy against the father's hand.”
― Michael Chabon, The Road

“This paradox, like a brutal syllogism, leads McCarthy, almost one sense in spite of himself, to conclude The Road on a note of possible redemption that while moving and reassuring is prepared for neither by one;'s reading of his prior work nor, perhaps, by the novel itself. In order to destroy the world, it becomes necessary to save it.”
― Michael Chabon, The Road

“In his stories, his memories, and above all in his dreams, the father in The Road is visited as poignantly and dreadfully as Odysseus or Aeneas by ghosts, by the gibbering shades of the former world that populate the gray sunless hell which he and his son are daily obliged to harrow.”
― Michael Chabon, The Road

“It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.”
― Michael Chabon, The Road

“There was no great novel of the nineties. The last major books came out in the eighties, and they were Blood Meridian and then I’d say White Noise by Don DeLillo, who very well might have seen where everything was heading and whose work then articulated it all very well.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo