Cormac McCarthy Quotes

Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

I knew that my father was going to die of heart disease, and I was trying to make a heart for him.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so we ended up burying him a year to the day that he was diagnosed.

To me, death is dark, pain, grief.

I wrote a song called 'Here on Earth,' and the hook is, 'There's no answers here on earth.' Basically, searching for the 'why' when someone passes away, and I feel really fortunate that my dad lived as long as he did. But no matter what happens or how it happens, it's certainly a stinker.

When life is woe, and hope is dumb, the World says, "Go!" The Grave says, "Come!

Death straps me to the hospital bed, claws its way onto my chest and sits there.I didn't know it would hurt this much. I didn't know that everything good that's ever happened in my life would be emptied out by it.

The good die first, and they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, burn to the socket.

...she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.

That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

We each die countless little deaths on our way to the last. We die out of shame as humiliation. We perish from despair. And, of course, we die for love.

At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person - all my old friends are gone... & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world.

Whatever lives, lives to die in sorrow. We engage our hearts, and grasp after the things of this world, only to undergo the pang of losing them.

Unwearied, and with springing steps elate, I had conveyed my wealth along the road. The empty sack proved now a heavier load: I was borne down beneath its worthless weight. I stumbled on, and knocked at Death's dark gate. There was no answer. Stung by sorrow's goad I forced my way into that grim abode, And laughed, and flung Life's empty sack to Fate.

When Ma died, I didn't know how to go on, either. I don't know how. I don't feel the same know, not exactly. Now that I see that one day comes after another and you get through them one measure at a time. But I'd like to go, not like Fonda Nye, I don't want to die, I just want to go, away, out of the dust.

Once to die is better than length of days in sorrow without end.

Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.

When the end comes, dark and hungry I'll be alone, love When the end comes, black and starving I'll say good-bye, love.-from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I have to tell you it was the first time even after all these years of expecting my own death that i truly knew what it meant to die because with you gone there was nothing left for me to live for.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.