"Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Cormac McCarthy quotes (page 7 of 18)
357 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Ah me, thou Destiny, Giver of evil gifts."
Read quote
6 likes
"Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge"
Read quote
6 likes
"My daddy used to tell me not to chew on somethin that was eatin you."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?"
Read quote
6 likes
"You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise."
Read quote
6 likes
"Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing."
Read quote
6 likes
"Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be."
Read quote
6 likes
"The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it."
Read quote
6 likes
"Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion."
Read quote
6 likes
"The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
Read quote
6 likes
"The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't."
Read quote
6 likes
"But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse"
Read quote
6 likes
"I'd rather to make a good run as a bad stand."
Read quote
6 likes
"You have to carry the fire." I don't know how to." Yes, you do." Is the fire real? The fire?" Yes it is." Where is it? I don't know where it is." Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it."
Read quote
5 likes
"My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said 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. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you."
Read quote
5 likes
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings."
Read quote
5 likes
"Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else."
Read quote
5 likes
"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."
Read quote
5 likes