quotes by Cormac McCarthy

"Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
— Cormac McCarthy

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
"
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstitiion 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.

I dont see what that has to do with catchin birds.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

That would be a hell of a zoo.

The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.

"
— Cormac McCarthy

"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.
"
— Cormac McCarthy

"What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?"
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men)

"That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing (Border Trilogy, Vol 2))

"
"Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning."
"
— Cormac McCarthy

"There is no God and we are his prophets."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy

""I will do what I promised." He wispered. " No matter what.I will not send you into the darkness alone."""
— Cormac McCarthy

"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't 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. Nothing else.
"
— Cormac McCarthy

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"See the child."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said"
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing (Border Trilogy, Vol 2))