Outer Dark Quotes

“Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“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 tinker in his burial tree was a wonder to the birds. The vultures that came by day to nose with their hooked beaks among his buttons and pockets like outrageous pets soon left him naked of his rags and flesh alike. Black mandrake sprang beneath the tree as it will where the seed of the hanged falls and in spring a new branch pierced his breast and flowered in a green boutonnière perennial beneath his yellow grin. He took the sparse winter snows upon what thatch of hair still clung to his dried skull and hunters that passed that way never chanced to see him brooding among his barren limbs. Until wind had tolled the thinker's bones and seasons loosed them one by one to the ground below and his bleached and weathered brisket hung in that lonesome wood like a bone birdcage.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone.
She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“In a world darksome as this'n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“What discordant vespers do the tinker's goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. Hounded by grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor clamored at heel through wood and fen by his own querulous and inconsolable wares in perennial tin malediction.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo's clamor.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew. On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“Live by yourself and you bound to talk yourself and when ye commence that folks start it up that you're light in the head. But I reckon it's all right to talk to a dog since most folks do even if a dog don't understand and cain't answer if he did.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“They watched her sit, holding the bundle up before her, the lamp just at her elbow belabored by a moth whose dark shape cast upon her face appeared captive within the delicate skull, the thin and roselit bone, like something kept in a china mask”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“He followed it down, in full flight now, the trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“Don’t flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain’t christian. Let’s go then. Hump up there, stranger, and let’s go get hung.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“A dead man's dog ain't got a name.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“The tinker jerked his arm away. He leaned his face toward her. Give, he said. I give a lifetime wanderin in a country where I was despised. Can you give that? I give forty years strapped in front of a cart like a mule till I couldn’t stand straight to be hanged. I’ve not got soul one in this world save a old halfcrazy sister that nobody never would have like they never would me. I been rocked and shot at and whipped and kicked and dogbit from one end of this state to the other and you cain’t pay that back. You ain’t got nothin to pay it with. Them accounts is in blood and they ain’t nothin in this world to pay em out with.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“Hard people makes 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

“When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“She went to the window and looked out. The ground fell away to a branch where willows burned lime green in the sunset. Dark little birds kept crossing the fields to the west like heralds of some coming dread. Below the branch stood the frame of an outhouse from which the planks had been stripped for firewood and there hung from the ceiling a hornetnest like a gross paper egg. The tinker returned from the cart with a lantern”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“La notte calò lenta e fredda sulla foresta intorno a lui, e scese una quiete spettrale. Come se qualcosa stesse per accadere, grilli e uccelli notturni tacquero spaventati. Lui accelerò il passo. Nel buio ormai completato si ritrovò smarrito in una foresta paludosa, si dibatté nei pantani risucchianti e si mise quasi a correre [...]. Quando piombò fragorosamente nella radura in mezzo al pioppeto, cadde lungo disteso e rimase per terra con la guancia appoggiata al suolo. E mentre giaceva così un lampo remoto percorse il cielo con la sua luce azzurra, e, in una primordiale visione del mondo dall'occhio fessurato di un embrione d'uccello, scorrendo atroce e istantaneo da buio a buio, gli regalò infine lo spettacolo della cavità e dell'informe plasma bianco che si dibatteva sul muschio rigoglioso e iniziatico, come una magra lepre di palude. Lo avrebbe preso per un fratello senz'ossa della paura stessa che si sentiva in cuore, se il bambino non avesse gridato.
Il bambino urlava la sua maledizione al mondo tenebroso e maleodorante in cui era nato, piangendo e piangendo, mentre l'uomo giaceva a terra farfugliando con le mascelle paralizzate, e con le mani respingeva la notte come un folle paracleto assediato dalle suppliche dell'intero limbo.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“but”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“The flowered crown to all other abominations. A walkin plague in your own house. That’s what’s been”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“You may see the time you wish you had worse.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“She crouched in the bushes and watched it, a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun’s eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“With full dark he came forth, a solitary traveler going south. He walked all night.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“He visto tantas maldades que no sé cómo Dios no apaga el sol y acaba con todos nosotros”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“We still Christians here. You'll have to come back on a weekday.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“He stood in the center of the square where the tracks of commerce lay fossilized in dried mud all about him, turning, an amphitheatrical figure in that moonwrought waste manacled to a shadow that struggled grossly in the dust.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark