Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Virtually all his life he had been in the position of leading groups of men, yet the truth was he had never liked groups. Men he admired for their abilities in action almost always brought themselves down in his estimation if he had to sit around and listen to them talk—or watch them drink or play cards or run off after women. Listening to men talk usually made him feel more alone than if he were a mile away by himself under a tree. He had never really been able to take part in the talk. The endless talk of cards and women made him feel more set apart—and even a little vain. If that was the best they could think of, then they were lucky they had him to lead them. It seemed immodest, but it was a thought that often came to him.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“The kind of people I know now don’t have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. They’re wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and wait for chances.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagles own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.”
― Aesop

“Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph”
― Robert E. Howard

“You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.”
― Stephen King, It

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven - or even proven at all - to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfiring- then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“We all have to meet our match sometime or other.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“It's always the same story: It's not 'violence' until somebody hits you back. Till then, you don't notice your guys hitting the other tribe. That's just normal background noise. It takes blood, buckets of it, to get a person's attention. And not just anybody's blood--it's gotta be your own, or that of a close relative. Otherwise it's just spots on the sidewalk.”
― Gary Brecher, War Nerd

“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

“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 sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“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.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing. ”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Hard people make hard times. I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why god ain't put out the sun and gone away.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down