Top 357 Quotes & Sayings by Cormac McCarthy - Page 3

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.

I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me.

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he's made of it. You tell me that I want God's love? I don't. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there's no-one to ask it of. And there's no going back, there's no setting things right, there's only the hope of nothingness.

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

Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.

The point is there ain't no point.

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

It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.

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.

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?

The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.

This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.

Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

You have my whole heart. You always did.

There was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.

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

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.

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.

When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

People think they know what they want but they generally don't. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways.

If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?

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

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

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

Any time you're throwin dirt you're losin ground.

He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less.

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.

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.

It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.

There is no greater monster than reason.

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

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.

It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.

When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?

Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones.

Dying ain't in people's plans, is it?

Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering.

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

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.

You go back home and everything you wished was different is still the same and everything you wished was the same is different.

For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?

But I didn't know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?

They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?

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.

Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. 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.

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it.

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 a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin?