Cormac McCarthy Quotes

The fall from your dream into reality is especially hard when you've seen that you can fly.

Seeing my parents makes me realise that life is not a fairy tale.

Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.

Life is never quite like the brochure.

It gets harder the more you know. Because the more you find out the uglier everything seems.

When I was young, people used to say to me: Wait until you're fifty, you'll see. I am fifty. I haven't seen anything.

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

And that's when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: "Life isn't fair, Bill. we tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be.

If it came true, it wasn't much of a dream.

Dreaming was only nice while it lasted.

It's not fair," I said. "It's just so goddamned unfair." "The world," he said, "is not a wishgranting factory.

No," says Ariana. "It was a dream. Reality got in the way, that's all.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.

Life is not what you expected it to be.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true. When will you realize... Vienna waits for you.

Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.

Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth.

Stupid dreams. Even the good ones are bad, because they remind you how poorly reality measures up.

Life is not a song, sweetling. Someday you may learn that, to your sorrow.