Top 357 Quotes & Sayings by Cormac McCarthy

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

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

you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.

Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.

There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.

There is no later. This is later.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

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 patterns 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.

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

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

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

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

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

There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.

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

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

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

There's a difference between quittin and knowin when you're beat.

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

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.

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.

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.

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

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.

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse

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

Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.

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

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

You have to carry the fire." I don't know how to." Yes, you do." Is the fire real? The fire?" Yes it is." Where is it? I don't know where it is." Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.

It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.

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.

If only my heart were stone.

Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.

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.

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

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

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.

Ever step you take is forever.