Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.

I aint drinkin after no mule, said the hermit. Have you not got no old bucket nor nothin?

He thought there could be deathships out there yet, drifting with their lolling rags of sail. Or life in the deep. Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness. Shuttling past like trains, eyes the size of saucers. And perhaps beyond those shrouded wells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.

Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian. Let's go then. Hump up there, stranger, and let's go get hung.

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.

I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life. Is that right? Aye. The kid turned the leather in his lap. The expriest watched him. At night, said Tobin, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears them grazing? Dont nobody hear them if they're asleep. Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes? Every man. Aye, said the expriest. Every man.

Blood was a condition of their lives and none asked what had befallen him or why.

He saw a tourist drunk laboring up the sidewalk carrying a full suit of armor. He saw a beautiful young woman vomit in the street. Dogs turned at the sound and ran toward her.

The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past the men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and wales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.

If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.