Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the moon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

Really. Been married once. No children. Amicably divorced. I dont have any tragedies in my life to give it a form and destination outside of my control. I like what I'm doing. But I could be doing something else. I've been blessed. I'm not even sure I'd change the bad things. Here comes the food.

There's little equity in the Lord's gifts.

The frailty of everything revealed at last.

He'd bivouacked on the north side of the town

Lumea nu are nici un nume. Numele de cerros, sierras si deserturi exista numai pe harti. Le punem nume ca sa nu ne ratacim. Dar am inventat aceste nume tocmai pentru ca am ratacit deja drumul. Lumea nu se poate pierde. Noi ne pierdem. Si tocmai pentru ca noi am pus numele acestea si am numit aceste coordonate, numele lor nu ne poate salva. Nu pot regasi drumul in locul nostru.

The other thing is the old people, and I keep comin back to them. They look at me it's always a question. Years back I dont remember that. I dont remember it when I was sheriff back in the fifties. You see em and they dont even look confused. They just look crazy. That bothers me. It's like they woke up and they dont know how they got where they're at. Well, in a manner of speakin they dont.

What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations.

If I could plan my life I wouldnt want to live it.

Perhaps they had come to warn him. But of what? That he couldn't enkindle in the boy's heart what was ashes in his own?

The facade of the building bore an array of saints in their niches and they had been shot up by American troops trying their rifles, the figures shorn of ears and noses and darkly mottled with leadmarks oxidized upon the stone.