The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn’t know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren’t.
CORMAC MCCARTHYBy day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
More Cormac McCarthy Quotes
-
-
Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.
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 -
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 -
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 -
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that’s just about the best kind of luck you can have.
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 -
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 -
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 -
He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.
CORMAC MCCARTHY -
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
CORMAC MCCARTHY -
I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.
CORMAC MCCARTHY -
Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.
CORMAC MCCARTHY -
Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.
CORMAC MCCARTHY -
There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else. Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both.
CORMAC MCCARTHY -
It is personal. That’s what an education does. It makes the world personal.
CORMAC MCCARTHY