Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.

If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world...

Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on...

It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and...

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing.

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of....

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement....

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following...

I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don’t wake up forever.

It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at...

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...

When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and...

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

You can tell it any way you want but that’s the way it is. I should of done it and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back....

The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and...

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.

There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me…. You’ll be all right.

I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing.

I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant...

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet...

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.

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...

What is it?Nothing. I had a bad dream.What did you dream about?Nothing.Are you okay?No.He put his arms around him and held him. It’s okay, he said.I was crying. But you didnt wake up.I’m sorry. I...

They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down...

Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there’s little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content....

And after and for a long time to come he’d have reason to evoke the recollection of [the strangers’] smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to...

You have my whole heart. You always did.

I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about...

Here beyond men’s judgments all covenants were brittle.

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.

Soll ich dir eine Geschichte erzählen? Nein.Warum nicht? Der Junge sah ihn an und wandte den Blick ab.Warum nicht? Diese Geschichten sind nicht wahr. Das müssen sie auch nicht sein. Es sind Geschichten. Ja. Aber...

If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.

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...

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

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

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...

I aint sure we’ve seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they’d have to build a annex on to hell.

The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that...

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

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

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy...

He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath...