Cormac McCarthy World Quotations

Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.

It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less.

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

The hardest lesson in the world: Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.

Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.

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.

The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

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.

I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.

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.

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.

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

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.

So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

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.

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

Each the others world entire.

Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.