Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them.

The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there's nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?

You have to believe that there is good in the world. I'm goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life.

Yeah. He aint here to say though, is he? I dont know. Someways I think he'll always have a say.

One thing about me, when I'm wrong I'll admit it. Well. That's a good trait to have.

They're a pack of dimpled fuckwits and you can tell them I said so.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we've lost.

The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it. A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history.

I know they's a lots of things in a family history that just plain aint so. Any family. The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the saying goes.

The boy stood up and got his broom and put it over his shoulder. He looked at his father. What are our long term goals? he said. What? Our long term goals. Where did you hear that? I dont know. No, where did you? You said it. When? A long time ago. What was the answer? I dont know. Well. I dont either. Come on. It's getting dark.

Where the bodies are buried in the desert is a certain world, Counselor. Where they are simply left in the street is another. That is a country heretofore unknown to me. But it must have always been there, must it not?