Cormac McCarthy
I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.Collection: Differences
When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?Collection: Shooting
You have my whole heart. You always did.Collection: Heart
There is no greater monster than reason.Collection: Monsters
He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is.Collection: Giving
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.Collection: War
If you break little promises, you'll break big ones.Collection: Promise
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.Collection: Hands
Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.Collection: Dark
Just take me with you. Please. I cant. Please, Papa. I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.Collection: Son
He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.Collection: Long
When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?Collection: Gone
People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.Collection: People
There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.Collection: Left
I dont know what I ever done, she said. I truly dont. Chigurh nodded. Probably you do, he said. There's a reason for everything. She shook her head. How many times I've said them very words. I wont again.Collection: Done
The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.Collection: Eye
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.Collection: Children
No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It's never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?Collection: People
Suttree surfaced from these fevered deeps to hear a maudlin voice chant latin by his bedside, what medieval ghost come to usurp his fallen corporeality. An oiled thumball redolent of lime and sage pondered his shuttered lids.Miserere mei, Deus ...His ears anointed, his lips ... omnis maligna discordia ... Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria. Japheth when you left your father's house the birds had flown. You were not prepared for such weathers. You'd spoke too lightly of the winter in your father's heart. We saw you in the streets. Sad.Collection: Latin
I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.Collection: Dies
She smiled. I think it's just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think. Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then.Collection: Thinking
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.Collection: War
... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.Collection: Country
Do you have any notion of how goddamned crazy you are?Collection: Crazy
It just bothered me that you might think I'm somethin special. I aint.Collection: Thinking
What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.Collection: Reality
Books lie, he said. God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.Collection: Lying
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.Collection: Dream
Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.Collection: Real
They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.Collection: Horse
Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.Collection: Country
This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.Collection: Country
He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth's cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.Collection: Sea
The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here. Yeah. You don't think that's so great. It's okay.Collection: Real
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.Collection: Hurt
It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.Collection: People
If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?Collection: People
I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.Collection: Enemy
Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.Collection: Boys
The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.Collection: Past
I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.Collection: Perspective
Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.Collection: Father
Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing.Collection: Spring
Last words are only words.Collection: Lasts
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.Collection: Dream
What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.Collection: Smoking
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.Collection: War
Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.Collection: Men
In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.Collection: Dream