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

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

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

"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

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

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"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

"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)

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?"
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."
— Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)

"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)

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?"
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"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

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

"No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have the just's umbrellas"
— Cormac McCarthy (The Stonemason)

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy

"When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"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

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.
I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

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

"On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty."
— Cormac McCarthy (Cities of the Plain)

"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)

"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 (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing..."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

"Who knows what worse luck your bad luck has save you from."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"Men of God and men of war have strange affinities."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
— Cormac McCarthy

"He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die.
He's going to die anyway.
He's so scared, Papa.
The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.
The boy didn't answer. He just sat there with his head down, sobbing.
You're not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn't understand him. What? He said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot."
— Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (All The Pretty Horses)

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (All The Pretty Horses)

"By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)