Cormac McCarthy Quotes

Enjoyment of football is part of the social context, and I have lost my faith in this social context.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

The only true love is love at first sight; second sight dispels it.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.

The worst thing that can happen in a democracy - as well as in an individual's life - is to become cynical about the future and lose hope.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

You know, for a long time I became almost atheist. I believed in nothing. And it was tough for me to believe in anything at all because I had believed so strongly. And I divorced myself of spirituality, I think.

Love makes you blind. One day you're in love, the next day you wake up and realize that not everything is perfect.

My whole faith was shattered there for a while.

When I say I wasn't a 'meant to be' guy, I've almost been jaded in the sport, where I don't believe in anything.

I no longer feel the spirit of Europe.

my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.

Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something - I think they just didn't know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.

When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.

It can be frustrating to see how society has taken the sacred out of everything.

Posterity--the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism--grows ever harder to conceive.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

Now we have no God. We have had two: the old God that our fathers handed down to us, that we hated, and never liked; the new one that we made for ourselves, that we loved; but now he has flitted away from us, and we see what he was made of - the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned and throned. Now we have no God.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz

Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed ... Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean.

It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.