Quotes by 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.

you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there aint nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. Its just a aggravation.

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

Where men cant live gods fare no better.

Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?

This other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from mens fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.

He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.

Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This gawky wormbent tabernacle.

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

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

The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.

John Grady looked at the table. The paper cat stepped thin and slant among the shapes of cats thereon. He looked up again. Yessir, he said. Just me and him.

If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various times after theyd said theyd be there. I never heard one yet that didnt have a reason for it.Yessir.But there aint but one reason.Yessir.You know what it is?No sir.Its that their words no good. Thats the only reason there ever was or ever will be.

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.

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

Just take me with you. Please.I cant.Please, Papa.I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.

He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ships light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past mens knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.