Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

Too soon old and too late smart. You dont know anything till it gets here. You told me once that maybe the end of the road has nothing to do with the road. Maybe it doesnt even know there's been a road. You ready?

She came down the steps slowly, madonna bereaved, so grief-stunned and wooden pieta of perpetual dawn, the birds were hushed in the presence of this gravity and the derelict that she had taken for the son of light himself was consumed in shame like a torch. She touched him as a blind person might. Deep in the floor of her welling eyes dead leaves scudding. Please go away, she said.

A man is always right to pursue the thing he loves. No matter even if it kills him? I think so. Yes. No matter what.

The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments

Or even knows they need attendin to. But I never done it to benefit myself. Shot that thing. Like I kept peace for seven year sake of a man I never knowed nor seen his face and like I seen them fellers never had no business there and if I couldn't run em off I could anyway let em know they was one man would let on that he knowed what they was up to. But I knowed if they could build it they could build it back and I done it anyway. Ever man loves peace and a old man best of all.

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledger book? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

Just remember that the things you put in your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, don't you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

You'd be a woreout sumbuck. I'll tell you that. Think how good you'd sleep.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.

He knew that those things we most desire to hold in our hearts are often taken from us while that which we would put away seems often by that very wish to become endowed with unsuspected powers of endurance. He knew how frail is the memory of loved ones. How we close our eyes and speak to them. How we long to hear their voices once again, and how those voices and those memories grow faint and faint until what was flesh and blood is no more than echo and shadow. In the end perhaps not even that.

This night, thy soul may be required of thee.