Cormac McCarthy
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.Collection: Teacher
If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.
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.
Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.
I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.
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.
People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.
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.
Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.Collection: Inspirational
At one time in the world there were woods that no one ownedCollection: Nature
She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.Collection: Finals
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.Collection: Good Luck
Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.Collection: Way To Live
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.Collection: Luck
Any time you're throwin dirt you're losin ground.Collection: Dirt
Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.Collection: Lying
I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.Collection: Stupid
The rain falls upon the just And also on the unjust fellas But mostly it falls upon the just Cause the unjust have the just's umbrellasCollection: Fall
One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.Collection: Age
The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.Collection: Frail
This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give upCollection: Giving Up
You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.Collection: Want
There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Crush
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.Collection: Gone
A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.Collection: Dream
You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't 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.Collection: Giving Up
You have to carry the fire." I don't know how to." Yes, you do." Is the fire real? The fire?" Yes it is." Where is it? I don't know where it is." Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.Collection: Real
Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.Collection: People
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 a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Heart
There's a difference between quittin and knowin when you're beat.Collection: Differences
He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.Collection: Fall
The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries.Collection: Mother
It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.Collection: Knowing Who You Are
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.Collection: Doe
In every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die.Collection: War
They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.Collection: Weed
To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere.Collection: God
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.Collection: Two
Easy to see that naught save sorrow could bring a man to such a view of things. And yet a sorrow for which there can be no help is no sorrow. It is some dark sister traveling in sorrow's clothing. Men do not turn from God so easily you see. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be 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.Collection: Believe
The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing's inside and can you guess his shape? Where he's kept or what's the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a time warp, a carder of souls from the world's nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his dead cart through the streets and does he call his trade to each? Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just such wise that he's invited inCollection: Wise
Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to themCollection: Lying
And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.Collection: Beach
What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.Collection: Believe
The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.Collection: Writing
The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.Collection: Voice
I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.Collection: Believe
For things at a common destination there is a common path. Not always easy to see. But there.Collection: Path