Quotes by Cormac McCarthy

“Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.”

“By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.”

“I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you alw...”

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

“whoever approaches his goal dances”

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

“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...”

“When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compar...”

“Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.”

“His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep.”

“A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of...”

“Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.”

“I didn't mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said.I know you didn't.I just meant I'd seen some things I'd as soon not of.I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont k...”

“I dont know what happens to country.”

“Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to whic...”

“The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

“Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.”

“Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.”

“People always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”