Cormac McCarthy Quotes - Page 5

There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

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.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

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

The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women.

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.

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

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

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.

The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.

There is no God and we are his prophets.

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 anywhere.

Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.

Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.

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.

I didn't mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said. I know you didn't. I just meant I'd seen some things I'd as soon not of. I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back. Yessir.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?

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.

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen.

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.