Cormac McCarthy Quotes

Nothing I'm doing is without its predecessors.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

In my view, you can't go to the future if you haven't come from the past.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Let them look to the past, but let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look also to the land of their children.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

I am connected to the past in a way that keeps me going forward. Every leap forward that I make is by reaching back and firmly getting a footing in the past, and pushing forward as hard as I can.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

You can't build a future if you don't have a past.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

I want to make sure people are connected with the future as well as the past.

Each of us is tied, in some fashion, to the past. We are all part of a continuum.

We clasp the hands of those who go before us.

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.

There is no beginning that is a blank page.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.