Cormac McCarthy Quotes

“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.”

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“There is no forgiveness. For women.

A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”

“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. It ain't the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it.

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.”

“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.”

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”

“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 man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”

“At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned.”

“Each man is the bard of his own existence.”

“Best way to live in California is to be from somewhere else.”

“Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“The point is there ain't no point.”

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