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Men believe death's elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.

Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: July 20
Novelist
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Charles McCarthy
Death
Elections
Facts
Invites
Thing
Follows
Every
Foot
Believe
Extent
Men
Election
Accomplices
Destiny
Inscrutable
Feet
Deaths

More quotes by Cormac McCarthy

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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
Cormac McCarthy
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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.
Cormac McCarthy
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How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.
Cormac McCarthy
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You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.
Cormac McCarthy
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There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.
Cormac McCarthy
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They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.
Cormac McCarthy
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Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
Cormac McCarthy
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Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.
Cormac McCarthy
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What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?
Cormac McCarthy
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The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.
Cormac McCarthy
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We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.
Cormac McCarthy
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The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.
Cormac McCarthy
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It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It's not the one thing.
Cormac McCarthy
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There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.
Cormac McCarthy
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And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
Cormac McCarthy
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You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise.
Cormac McCarthy
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... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.
Cormac McCarthy
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He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.
Cormac McCarthy
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She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.
Cormac McCarthy