The legendary and iconic writer Cormac McCarthy is eighty two years old today. This amazing talent has a legacy of gritty books that confront death in a prose that at times is biblical in its sparseness, surreal in its dream like quality, and hard as rock and iron in its punch. Amazing novels like, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, The Road, Outer Darkness, All the Pretty Horses are just a few in his vast library.
To celebrate this literary great's birth I will present fourteen of his greatest quotes:
1. "There is no God and we are his prophets." (The Road, 2006)
2. "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." ("Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" The New York Times, 1992)
3. "Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death." (Outer Dark, 1968)
4. "Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them." (Blood Meridian, 1985)
5. "He reached down and tapped Suttree's knee with his forefinger. You, my good buddy, are a fourteen carat gold plated son of a bitch. That's what your problem is. And that being your problem, there's not a whole lot of people in sympathy with you. Or with your problem." (Suttree, 1979)
6. "Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." ("Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy" The Washington Post, 2009)
7. "I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away." (Outer Dark, 1968)
8. "It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong." (Child of God, 1973)
9. "It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it." (No Country for Old Men, 2005)
10. "How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it." (Suttree, 1979)
11. "The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full." (Blood Meridian, 1985)
12. "It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable." (All the Pretty Horses, 1992)
13. "The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all." (The Crossing, 1994)
14. "You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. (No Country for Old Men, 2005)