Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthyis an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses, he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 July 1933
CityProvidence, RI
CountryUnited States of America
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that's just about the best kind of luck you can have.
In dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.
Hell ain't half full.
What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream
Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.
The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.
They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.
The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.
It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight...
It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing.
We're carrying the fire.
You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.
To have a child when you're older, it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things, you know, afresh. It forces the world on you. And I think it's a good thing.
Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.