Quotes from Cormac McCarthy

If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People

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

Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination.

When smart people do dumb things it's usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear. They want something they're not supposed to have or they've done something they weren't supposed to do. In either case they've usually fasten on to a set of beliefs that are supportive of their state of mind but at odds with reality. It has become more important for them to believe that to know.

The sweeter the more lethal, Squire. Oh you do occasionally find one who flies her true colors. It's even refreshing in a way. A bitch to the teeth, fair field and no favor. Dried scrotums strung on a cord hanging from the footboard. But these other ones. The shy smile and the downturned eyes. Jesus. Spare me. What has happened to our cavalier, John?

A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.

You think that nuclear war is inevitable. I agree with Plato that only the dead have seen an end to war. And people dont fight with rocks when they have guns. Etcetera and so on.

Where is Shelby, whom you left to the mercies of Elias in the desert, and where is Tate whom you abandoned in the mountains? Where are the ladies, ah the fair and tender ladies with whom you danced at the governor's ball when you were a hero anointed with the blood of the enemies of the republic you'd elected to defend? -Cormac mcCarthy, Blood Meridian

The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy. I suppose that's true. What then? Is that all that the world has in mind? If the world has a mind then it's all worse than we thought.

The dying man sang with great clarity and intention and the riders setting forth upcountry may have ridden more slowly the longer to hear him for they were of just these qualities themselves.

Across the yard, brilliant against the façade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.