Cormac McCarthy
It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.Collection: Sight
When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.Collection: Mother
Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.Collection: Sadness
Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.Collection: Suicide
The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.Collection: Dream
Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.Collection: Winning
Ever step you take is forever.Collection: Forever
He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die. He's going to die anyway. He's so scared, Papa. The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared. The boy didn't answer. He just sat there with his head down, sobbing. You're not the one who has to worry about everything. The boy said something but he couldn't understand him. What? He said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.Collection: Boys
Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.Collection: Morning
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.Collection: All The Pretty Horses
A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.Collection: Running
The freedom of birds is an insult to me.Collection: Bird
Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.Collection: Atheist
You are either born a writer or you are not.Collection: Born
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.Collection: Heart
Our enemies ... seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.Collection: Memories
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?Collection: Men
For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?Collection: Should Have
They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.Collection: Stars
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.Collection: Men
My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said 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. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you.Collection: Inspirational
It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.Collection: Women
When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.Collection: Dies
He may be dead; or he may be teaching English.Collection: Teaching
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.Collection: Hands
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.Collection: Joy
By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.Collection: Inspirational
The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Journey
Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.Collection: Choices
Ah me, thou Destiny, Giver of evil gifts.Collection: Destiny
Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.Collection: Firsts
Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch.Collection: Book
But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothin' would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know better'n that. I've thought about it a good deal. . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don't have no intentions of carvin' a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.Collection: Heart
The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.Collection: Names
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. (All the Pretty Horses)Collection: Horse
When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.Collection: Running
Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.Collection: Eye
There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.Collection: Rain
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down." -The JudgeCollection: Believe
There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.Collection: Fall
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.Collection: Dream
The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.Collection: Flames
Pain for the old was no longer a surprise.Collection: Pain
Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.Collection: Memories
Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.Collection: Ocean
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.Collection: Curse