Cormac McCarthy Quotes

By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

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

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

—I dont believe in this one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he's made of it. You tell me that I want God's love? I don't. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there's no-one to ask it of. And there's no going back, there's no setting things right, there's only the hope of nothingness.

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

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?

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.

Books lie, he said.
God dont lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.

But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.