cormac mccarthy Quotes

Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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

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

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.

- Cormac McCarthy

You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.

- Cormac McCarthy, Sanas Chormaic: Cormac's Glossary

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.

- Cormac McCarthy

He watched him stoke the flames, God's own firedrake. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

- Cormac McCarthy

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, Cities of the Plain

But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way o show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet is all we have.

- Cormac McCarthy

They camped that night on the foreplain at the foot of a talus slope and the murder that had been reckoned upon took place.

- Cormac McCarthy

You focus on telling stories,
we do everything else.