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Cormac McCarthy
63 quotes
“There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think 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.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New York Times, April 19, 1992, "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" by Richard B. Woodward
“I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009, "Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy" by John Jurgensen
“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.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009, "Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy" by John Jurgensen
“Yes, he said. I busted him and he busted me. That's fair, ain't it?The boy was still silent, calmly incredulous.No, Sylder went on, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that throws it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man sat watching the road, the weedstem twirling in his mouth and the threadthin shadow of it going long and short upon his face like a sundial's hand beneath a sun berserk.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes mam. I'm sorry you've had such troubles. Mm-hmm. 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 (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 the 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.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong. (p.71)”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls. (p.128)”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p.130)”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he is sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their blood in history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him? (p.147)”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath. (p.149)”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said. The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said, I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one. (p.158)”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When he looked back at the primadonna she was watching them through the spyglasses. As if she might better assess them in that way where they set forth upon the shadowbanded road, the coming twilight. Inhabiting only that ocular ground in which the country appeared out of nothing and vanished again into nothing, tree and rock and the darkening mountains beyond, all of it contained and itself containing only what was needed and nothing more.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such value.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“White: I long for Darkness. I pray for death, real death. And if I thought that in death I would meet the people I knew in life, I don't know what I would do. That would be the ultimate horror, the ultimate nightmare. If I thought I was gonna meet my mother again an' start all of that over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to... that would be the final nightmare. Goddamn Kafka on wheels.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“White: You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesnt 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.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She slept and sleeping she dreamt that she was running after a train with her brother running along the cinderpath and in the morning she put that in her letter. We were running after the train Bobby and it was drawing away from us into the night and the lights were dimming away in the darkness and we were stumbling along the track and I wanted to stop but you took my hand and in the dream we knew that we had to keep the train in sight or we would lose it. That following the track would not help us. We were holding hands and we were running and then I woke up and it was day.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be. After she left the quarry he sat alone until the small flames in their tins had guttered out one by one. Then just the dark of the countryside, the silence of it. The faint drone of a truck out on the highway.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He wrote in his little black book by the light of the oil lamp. Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you. We pour water upon the child and name it. Not to fix it in our hearts but in our clutches. The daughters of men sit in half darkened closets inscribing messages upon their arms with razorblades and sleep is no part of their life.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally he leaned and cupped his hand to the glass chimney and blew out the lamp and lay back in the dark. He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you really believe in physics?”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Wittgenstein convinced Russell that all math is a tautology, Russell gave up on math.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your life is set upon you like a dog.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The days are long but the years are short.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You shouldn't worry about what people think of you because they don't do it that often.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.”
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source