Cormac McCarthy quotes

Cormac McCarthy was an influential American novelist and playwright renowned for his distinctive prose and exploration of the darkest aspects of humanity. His acclaimed novels include "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," and "Blood Meridian." He became a defining voice in contemporary literature, earning numerous awards and inspiring generations of writers. Here are 274 of his quotes:

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.

Cormac McCarthy

Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.

Cormac McCarthy

If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.

Cormac McCarthy

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.

Cormac McCarthy

We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.

Cormac McCarthy

You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

Cormac McCarthy

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Cormac McCarthy

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

Cormac McCarthy

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

Cormac McCarthy

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.

Cormac McCarthy

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

Cormac McCarthy

In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.

Cormac McCarthy

The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.

Cormac McCarthy

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Cormac McCarthy

If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?

Cormac McCarthy

White: I long for Darkness. I pray for death, real death. And if I thought that in death I would meet the people I knew in life, I don't know what I would do. That would be the ultimate horror, the ultimate nightmare. If I thought I was gonna meet my mother again an' start all of that over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to... that would be the final nightmare. Goddamn Kafka on wheels.

Cormac McCarthy

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

Cormac McCarthy

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.

Cormac McCarthy

The point is there ain't no point.

Cormac McCarthy

Where men can't live gods fare no better.

Cormac McCarthy

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.

Cormac McCarthy

People were 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.

Cormac McCarthy