Quotes by Cormac McCarthy

“I felt early on I wasnt going to be a respectable citizen.”

“I dont know why I started writing. I dont know why anybody does it. Maybe theyre bored, or failures at something else.”

“We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks.”

“He may be dead; or he may be teaching English.”

“All The Pretty Horses”

“Even if what youre working on doesnt go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing youre doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.”

You have my whole heart. You always did.

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.You forget some things, dont you?Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

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 theyd have no heart to start at all.

Anything that doesnt take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But 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.

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 many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no mans mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

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

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

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each mans opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont 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.

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.