Cormac McCarthy Quotes

It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.

In the nights sometimes now he’d wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

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

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.

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.

For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?

There is no greater monster than reason.

What joins men together … is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

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.