"They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds."
Quote collection
Cormac McCarthy quotes (page 12 of 18)
357 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Dying ain't in people's plans, is it?"
"Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not."
"See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass."
"Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of."
"Where men can't live gods fare no better."
"The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand."
"She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow."
"The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women."
"Hell ain't half full."
"Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."
"What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay."
"Even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering."
"What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?"
"When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them."
"All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage."
"Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold."
"For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?"
"There was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were."
"Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland."