Cormac McCarthy quotes:

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that 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.

The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him.

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.

Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.

If only my heart were stone.

The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.

They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.

If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.

He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

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.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

You think God looks out for people?...I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you're done there's wars and ruination and all hell. You don't know what's goin to happen. I'd say He's just about go to. I don't believe we'd make it a day otherwise.

All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.

Foreign stars in the nights down there. A whole new astronomy Mensa, Musca, the Chameleon. Austral constellations nigh unknown to northern folk. Wrinkling, fading, through the cold black waters. As he rocks in his rusty pannier to the sea's floor in a drifting stain of guano. What family has no mariner in its tree? No fool, no felon. No fisherman.

He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he."

It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing."

Our enemies ... seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.

You either stick or you quit. And I wouldnt quit you I dont care what you done.

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.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.

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.

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.

Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

The point is there ain't no point.

There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

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.

In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.

And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.

A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled. 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.

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing.

People always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.

I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]

Carry the fire.

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.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.

Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.

This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?

It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me.

Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

What's the bravest thing you ever did?He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

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.

I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt.

Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.

You have my whole heart. You always did.

Do you think I lie to you?No.But you think I might lie to you about dying.Yes.Okay. I might. But we're not dying.Okay.

He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.

This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.

I aint sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they'd have to build a annex on to hell.

When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are going to be.... You get a little older and you pull back on some of that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.

I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock~?

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.

He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.

The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.

Teaching writing is a hustle.

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

I dont know what I ever done, she said. I truly dont. Chigurh nodded. Probably you do, he said. There's a reason for everything. She shook her head. How many times I've said them very words. I wont again.

I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.

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.

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

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

But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothin' would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know better'n that. I've thought about it a good deal. . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don't have no intentions of carvin' a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.

What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?

I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.

It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.

If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen.

I'd rather to make a good run as a bad stand.

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.

She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.

You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.

Maybe it's like Mac says. Ever man winds up with the horse that suits him.

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.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

The trouble with a liar is he can't remember what he said.