1
You have my whole heart. You always did.Cormac McCarthy
2
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.Cormac McCarthy
3
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. .Cormac McCarthy
4
Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.Cormac McCarthy
5
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.Cormac McCarthy
6
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.Cormac McCarthy
7
Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.Cormac McCarthy
8
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. .Cormac McCarthy
9
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 many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. 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.Cormac McCarthy
10
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.Cormac McCarthy
11
Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.Cormac McCarthy
12
The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.Cormac McCarthy
13
You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.Cormac McCarthy
14
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.Cormac McCarthy
15
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.Cormac McCarthy
16
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.Cormac McCarthy
17
Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.Cormac McCarthy
18
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
19
Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing...Cormac McCarthy
20
Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, Oh God.Cormac McCarthy
21
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.Cormac McCarthy
22
Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him.Cormac McCarthy
23
You know we talked about where people go when they die. I just believe you go someplace and I seen her layin there and I thought maybe she wouldn't go to heaven because, you know, I thought she wouldn't and I thought about God forgivin people and I thought about if I could ask God to forgive me for killin that son of a bitch because you and me both know I ain't sorry for it and I reckon this sounds ignorant but I didn't want to be forgiven if she wasn't. I didn't want to do or be nothin that she wasn't like going to heaven or anything like that.Cormac McCarthy
24
You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.Cormac McCarthy
25
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., New York Times, April 19, 1992]Cormac McCarthy
26
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.Cormac McCarthy
27
You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.Cormac McCarthy
28
Carry the fire.Cormac McCarthy
29
This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up.Cormac McCarthy
30
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.Cormac McCarthy
31
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.Cormac McCarthy
32
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.Cormac McCarthy
33
Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.Cormac McCarthy
34
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.Cormac McCarthy
35
He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.Cormac McCarthy
36
This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.Cormac McCarthy
37
When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?Cormac McCarthy
38
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?Cormac McCarthy
39
The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the women stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.Cormac McCarthy
40
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.Cormac McCarthy
41
You are either born a writer or you are not.Cormac McCarthy
42
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.Cormac McCarthy
43
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., Nov. 20, 2009]Cormac McCarthy
44
There is no God and we are his prophets.Cormac McCarthy
45
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.Cormac McCarthy
46
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.Cormac McCarthy
47
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.Cormac McCarthy
48
The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.Cormac McCarthy
49
What is it? Nothing. I had a bad dream. What did you dream about? Nothing. Are you okay? No. He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said. I was crying. But you didnt wake up. I'm sorry. I was just so tired. I meant in the dream.Cormac McCarthy
50
Ah, they said. Qué bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to hear men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.Cormac McCarthy
51
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will.Cormac McCarthy
52
I dont believe knowing can save us. What isconstant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God–who knows all that can be known–seems powerless to change.Cormac McCarthy
53
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.Cormac McCarthy
54
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.Cormac McCarthy
55
All other trades are contained in that of war. Is that why war endures? No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not. That's your notion. The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. .Cormac McCarthy
56
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.Cormac McCarthy
57
This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be. .Cormac McCarthy
58
This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.Cormac McCarthy
59
If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.Cormac McCarthy
60
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. .Cormac McCarthy
61
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.. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.. Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.Cormac McCarthy
62
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.Cormac McCarthy
63
If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream? .Cormac McCarthy
64
In dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.Cormac McCarthy
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And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly.Cormac McCarthy
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Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.Cormac McCarthy
67
The freedom of birds is an insult to me.Cormac McCarthy
68
There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.Cormac McCarthy
69
A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.Cormac McCarthy
70
I just meant maybe you could set here and drink one of em with me. He squinted at her. You ever notice how women have trouble takin no for a answer? I think itstarts about age three. What about men? They get used to it. They better.Cormac McCarthy
71
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.Cormac McCarthy
72
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.Cormac McCarthy
73
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.Cormac McCarthy
74
He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's 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.Cormac McCarthy
75
Used to be a hobo right smart. back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I'd been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue looking and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.Cormac McCarthy
76
I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.Cormac McCarthy
77
The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a reason.Cormac McCarthy
78
...the space which [books] occupied was itself an expectation.Cormac McCarthy
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Whoever approaches his goal dancesCormac McCarthy
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I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.Cormac McCarthy
81
When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change. .Cormac McCarthy
82
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.Cormac McCarthy
83
At one time in the world there were woods that no one ownedCormac McCarthy
84
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 thaCormac McCarthy
85
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.Cormac McCarthy
86
I dont 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.Cormac McCarthy
87
Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.Cormac McCarthy
88
If only my heart were stone.Cormac McCarthy
89
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.Cormac McCarthy
90
The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed.Cormac McCarthy
91
There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . in whatever . . place by whatever . name or by no name at all . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.Cormac McCarthy
92
In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.Cormac McCarthy
93
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.Cormac McCarthy
94
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.Cormac McCarthy
95
A man is always right to pursue the thing he loves. No matter even if it kills him? I think so. Yes. No matter what.Cormac McCarthy
96
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.Cormac McCarthy
97
What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.Cormac McCarthy
98
Dope.They sell that shit to schoolkids. It's worse than that. How's that? Schoolkids buy it.Cormac McCarthy
99
By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.Cormac McCarthy
100
I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think .. that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get any .Cormac McCarthy