Cormac McCarthy
In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.Collection: Groups
I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt.Collection: Lying
I will do what I promised." He whispered. "No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.Collection: Darkness
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.Collection: Children
I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.Collection: Thinking
Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he's made of it. You tell me that I want God's love? I don't. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there's no-one to ask it of. And there's no going back, there's no setting things right, there's only the hope of nothingness.Collection: Dawn
Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.Collection: Dream
The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.Collection: Heart
This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.Collection: Jobs
You either stick or you quit. And I wouldnt quit you I dont care what you done.Collection: I Dont Care
Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.Collection: Horse
Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.Collection: Art
I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in itCollection: Original Thought
and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.Collection: Struggle
He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.Collection: Book
It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.Collection: Distance
This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?Collection: Crazy
The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.Collection: Flower
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.Collection: Taken
You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.Collection: Sex
When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.Collection: Mean
If a man's at odds to know his own mind it's because he hasn't got aught but his mind to know it with.Collection: Men
A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.Collection: Horse
The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.Collection: Morning
A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.Collection: Heart
It had ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.Collection: Dog
in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.Collection: Dream
The truth may often be carried about by those who themselves remain all unaware of it. They bear that which has weight and substance and yet for them has no name whereby it may be evoked or called forth. They go about ignorant of the true nature of their condition, such are the wiles of truth and such its stratagems.Collection: Truth
It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.Collection: Betrayal
Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.Collection: Desire
I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.Collection: Art
I guess if everybody went crazy together nobody would notice.Collection: Crazy
When the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be their yet.Collection: Truth
The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.Collection: Army
To have a child when you're older, it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things, you know, afresh. It forces the world on you. And I think it's a good thing.Collection: Children
I've always been interested in the Southwest. There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.Collection: Cowboy
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.Collection: Creation
Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.Collection: Lying
Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he saidCollection: Men
I guess you ought to be careful about cussin the dead. I would say at the least there probably ain't no luck in it.Collection: Luck
They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.Collection: Stars
Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.Collection: Events
In dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.Collection: Dream
Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.Collection: Men
In the spaniards heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love for truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.Collection: Heart
Each the others world entire.Collection: World
We're carrying the fire.Collection: Fire
Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.Collection: Men
He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.Collection: Memories