Quotes by Cormac McCarthy

“The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look...”

“What is it?Nothing. I had a bad dream.What did you dream about?Nothing.Are you okay?No.He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said.I was crying. But you didnt wake up.I'm sorry. I w...”

“Ah, they said. Qué bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to ...”

“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 awai...”

“What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.”

“If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and th...”

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common prove...”

“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”

“Used to be a hobo right smart. back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitt...”

“I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont...”

“...the space which [books] occupied was itself an expectation.”

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in...”

“At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned”

“If only my heart were stone.”

“The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A ...”

“There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all...”

“In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find ...”

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or ...”

“What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.”

“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?”