Cormac McCarthy Quotes

History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or – in this case – feared might come to pass passed by instead.

You can never say never. I'm not sure if I even want to. I just don't know. Some of it is just not able to be reached, you can't remember some of it and the people that could help you remember have passed away. It might have to remain a remain.

That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.

History admits no rules; only outcomes.

I think that the "what if" game is what you guys get to do. I don't have to do that. I hate the "what if" game. I'm such a believer in everything happening the way it's supposed to happen.

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.

I believe that we have free will. I believe we get the chance to make choices in our lives. Not everything is set in stone from the moment we're born. We choose our destiny, our ultimate fate. But I also think that we don't realize the choices we've made until after we make them. We're racing down a freeway, only to realize we've missed all the exits, and the only direction we can go is dead ahead.

You do what you do and you pay for your sins and there's no such thing as what might have been.

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.

Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.

O! that a man might know The end of this day's business, ere it come; But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known.

There is no such thing as a lost cause, because there is no such thing as a gained cause

The thing you hope will never happen to you might just happen to someone else instead, who has been spending their life dreading the thing that will happen to you.

[When anything happens, we interpret it as good or bad, but...] We do not know what is really good or bad fortune. [Only the future can decide. For example, what appears to be bad today may in fact lead us to a greater good tomorrow and by the very act of thinking and planning in that positive way, we can help make that good future come true.]

Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a point.

If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.

T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.