Cormac Mccarthy

Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.

She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.

They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

Just take me with you. Please. I cant. Please, Papa. I cant. I cant hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.

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.

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

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

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.

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

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.

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.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

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.

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

You have my whole heart. You always did.

He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?

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.

Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.

Nothin wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen.

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.