110+ Cormac McCarthy Quotes On Death, War And Dark

Cormac McCarthy was an American writer. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. His works are known for their dark, sometimes gruesome, subject matter and sparse, poetic language. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Cormac McCarthy on love, death, war.

Top 10 Cormac McCarthy Quotes

1. Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
2. The point is there ain't no point.
3. You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
4. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
5. Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.
6. There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.
7. Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.
8. Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.
9. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
10. in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.

Cormac McCarthy Short Quotes

• I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.
• The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
• If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around.
• It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
• There is no God and we are his prophets.
• I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.
• There is no greater monster than reason.
• He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
• By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
• This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

Cormac McCarthy Quotes About Love

Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love. — Cormac McCarthy

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. (All the Pretty Horses) — Cormac McCarthy

It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood. — Cormac McCarthy

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't. — Cormac McCarthy

When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different. — Cormac McCarthy

In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun. — Cormac McCarthy

In the spaniards heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love for truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself. — Cormac McCarthy

This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it. — Cormac McCarthy

Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us. — Cormac McCarthy

All human love is a faint type of God's; An echoing note from a harmonious whole; A feeble spark from an undying flame; A single drop from an unfathomed sea: But God's is infinite; it fills the earth And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space. — Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes About Death

In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. — Cormac McCarthy

They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I'll hug his neck. — Cormac McCarthy

He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is. — Cormac McCarthy

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it. — Cormac McCarthy

Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. — Cormac McCarthy

When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that? — Cormac McCarthy

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day. — Cormac McCarthy

He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there. — Cormac McCarthy

Dying ain't in people's plans, is it? — Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes About War

In every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die. — Cormac McCarthy

War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. — Cormac McCarthy

Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge — Cormac McCarthy

This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war. — Cormac McCarthy

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities. — Cormac McCarthy

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. — Cormac McCarthy

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. — Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes About Dark

The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops. — Cormac McCarthy

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. — Cormac McCarthy

And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. — Cormac McCarthy

What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream — Cormac McCarthy

In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell. — Cormac McCarthy

The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again. — Cormac McCarthy

I will do what I promised." He whispered. "No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone. — Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes About Life

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all. — Cormac McCarthy

you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation. — Cormac McCarthy

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave. — Cormac McCarthy

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. — Cormac McCarthy

It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose. — Cormac McCarthy

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing. — Cormac McCarthy

How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? — Cormac McCarthy

It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too. — Cormac McCarthy

If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent. — Cormac McCarthy

He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. — Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Quotes About World

I didn't mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said. I know you didn't. I just meant I'd seen some things I'd as soon not of. I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back. Yessir. — Cormac McCarthy

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 noon 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. — Cormac McCarthy

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be. — Cormac McCarthy

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down." -The Judge — Cormac McCarthy

And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells 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. — Cormac McCarthy

every man is tabernacled in every other, and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world. — Cormac McCarthy

If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only. — Cormac McCarthy

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. — Cormac McCarthy

I've always been interested in the Southwest. There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West. — Cormac McCarthy

To have a child when you're older, it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things, you know, afresh. It forces the world on you. And I think it's a good thing. — Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy Famous Quotes And Sayings

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now. — Cormac McCarthy

You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left. — Cormac McCarthy

Our enemies ... seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him. — Cormac McCarthy

The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one. — Cormac McCarthy

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. — Cormac McCarthy

They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey. — Cormac McCarthy

There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless. — Cormac McCarthy

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength. — Cormac McCarthy

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there. — Cormac McCarthy

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily. — Cormac McCarthy

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. — Cormac McCarthy

Choose your enemies carefully 'cause they will define you Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends Gonna last with you longer than your friend — Cormac McCarthy

A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done. — Cormac McCarthy

It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it. — Cormac McCarthy

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. — Cormac McCarthy

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. — Cormac McCarthy

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning. — Cormac McCarthy

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. — Cormac McCarthy

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits. — Cormac McCarthy

Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch. — Cormac McCarthy

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing. — Cormac McCarthy

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion. — Cormac McCarthy

Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere, it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot. — Cormac McCarthy

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. — Cormac McCarthy

The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. — Cormac McCarthy

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto. — Cormac McCarthy

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings. — Cormac McCarthy

What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle. — Cormac McCarthy

If you break little promises, you'll break big ones. — Cormac McCarthy

How can you believe in heaven if you don't believe in hell? — Cormac McCarthy

My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you. — Cormac McCarthy

I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it. — Cormac McCarthy

They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea. — Cormac McCarthy

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. — Cormac McCarthy

Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different. — Cormac McCarthy

He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all. — Cormac McCarthy

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf. — Cormac McCarthy

and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead. — Cormac McCarthy

There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us. — Cormac McCarthy

What joins men together ... is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. — Cormac McCarthy

Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now — Cormac McCarthy

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. — Cormac McCarthy

... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. — Cormac McCarthy

He didn't say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don't remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time. — Cormac McCarthy

The wind sounded of Mother Earth's forsaken and abandoned cries. — Cormac McCarthy

When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too. — Cormac McCarthy

The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. — Cormac McCarthy

Hell ain't half full. — Cormac McCarthy

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery. — Cormac McCarthy

People think they know what they want but they generally don't. Sometimes if they're lucky they'll get it anyways. — Cormac McCarthy

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out. — Cormac McCarthy

For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it? — Cormac McCarthy

Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. — Cormac McCarthy

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke. — Cormac McCarthy

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. — Cormac McCarthy

Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all. — Cormac McCarthy

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. — Cormac McCarthy

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all. — Cormac McCarthy

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? — Cormac McCarthy

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not. — Cormac McCarthy

Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. — Cormac McCarthy

You have to carry the fire." I don't know how to." Yes, you do." Is the fire real? The fire?" Yes it is." Where is it? I don't know where it is." Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it. — Cormac McCarthy

You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didnt. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I thinkI done the best with itI knew how but itstill wasntmine. It neverhas been. — Cormac McCarthy

If only my heart were stone. — Cormac McCarthy

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. — Cormac McCarthy

This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think? — Cormac McCarthy

Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning. — Cormac McCarthy

Life Lessons by Cormac McCarthy

1. Cormac McCarthy teaches us to appreciate the beauty of life, no matter how difficult it may be, and to never give up hope.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of family and friends, and how their presence can help us through difficult times.
3. Finally, McCarthy shows us that it is important to be open to new experiences and to never be afraid to take risks in order to find meaning and fulfillment in life.