Cormac McCarthy quotes - page 9

People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I don't recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did. (Cormac McCarthy)
You have my whole heart. You always did. You're the best guy. You always were. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
Carry the fire. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. [, New York Times, April 19, 1992]. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
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. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
I never knowed there was such a place as this. I guess there's probably every kind of place you can think of. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
I could have been somebody in this world wasn't for him. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. (Cormac McCarthy)
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realised that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching shape in the glass of the depot door. His fetch come up from life's other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
When they went down to the bunkhouse for dinner the vaqueros seemed to treat them with a certain deference but whether it was the deference accorded the accomplished or that accorded to mental defectives they were unsure. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
The old man ... said ... the notion that men can be understood was probably an illusion. (Cormac McCarthy)
...hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
Where is yesterday? ... And where is the fiddler and where is the dance? View quote
Cormac McCarthy