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Cormac McCarthy Quotes

1933–2023 United States

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.; July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023) was an American novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and screenwriter. He wrote twelve novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, modernist, and post-apocalyptic fiction genres.

United States
Essayists
Novelists
Playwrights
Screenwriters

Also known as: All the pretty horses, Child of god, The Sunset Limited, The sunset limited

Random Cormac McCarthy quote

35 quotes

...those exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema.

Do you really believe in physics?

The Passenger (2022)

Do you believe in an afterlife?

Stella Maris (2022)

My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow.

Stella Maris (2022)

Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy.

The Crossing (1994)

Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.

Stella Maris (2022)

Don't flang him off the bluff, boys. Tain't christian.

Outer Dark (1968)

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.

The Crossing (1994)

The man sat watching the road, the weedstem twirling in his mouth and the threadthin shadow of it going long and short upon his face like a sundial's hand beneath a sun berserk.

Outer Dark (1968)

Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls. (p.128)

Child of God (1973)

Your life is set upon you like a dog.

Stella Maris (2022)

Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case.

The Crossing (1994)

Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone.
She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.

Outer Dark (1968)

The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

Stella Maris (2022)

When they went down to the bunkhouse for dinner the vaqueros seemed to treat them with a certain deference but whether it was the deference accorded the accomplished or that accorded to mental defectives they were unsure.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Cormac McCarthy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.