He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

— Cormac McCarthy

He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why won't these waters take him?

— Cormac McCarthy

He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

— Cormac McCarthy

He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well, and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

— Cormac McCarthy

He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.

— Cormac McCarthy

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God never spoke.

— Cormac McCarthy

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

— Cormac McCarthy

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quarter moon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Capella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

— Cormac McCarthy

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. Furthermore, he says that he will never die.

— Cormac McCarthy

Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.

— Cormac McCarthy