Cormac McCarthy Quotes - Page 4

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

You are either born a writer or you are not.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me.

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

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 said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.

And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

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

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

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.

You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didnt. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I thinkI done the best with itI knew how but itstill wasntmine. It neverhas been.

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

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.

What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay.

All human love is a faint type of God's; An echoing note from a harmonious whole; A feeble spark from an undying flame; A single drop from an unfathomed sea: But God's is infinite; it fills the earth And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space.

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

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.