For nearly 60 years, Cormac McCarthy told powerful and mesmerizing stories set in the American South and Southwest, carrying the torch of the Southern Gothic literary genre established by such luminaries as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams. Starting with 1965’s The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy’s novels weave dark tales of imperfect main characters who battle the ills of a society in moral decay. His flawed protagonists live through disturbing situations as the author searches for wisdom in the eye of life’s most tempestuous storms.
After publishing memorable early works such as Outer Dark and Child of God, McCarthy became a literary household name thanks to 1985’s Blood Meridian, a hauntingly bloody romp through America’s frontier. After that, his literary acclaim only grew, with masterpieces such as All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men (its subsequent film adaptation won Best Picture in 2008), and his post-apocalyptic novel The Road, which earned the then-73-year-old author a Pulitzer Prize.
These 14 beautiful if haunting lines from McCarthy’s novels show that by facing the darker side of life, we can learn to travel a more righteous path.
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.
Fathers are always forgiven. In the end they are forgiven. Had it been women who dragged the world through these horrors there would be a bounty on them.
If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
Hard people make hard times.
At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned.
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that’s just about the best kind of luck you can have.
It is personal. That’s what an education does. It makes the world personal.
Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.
And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.
Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.
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Darren Orf
Darren lives in Portland, Oregon, has two cats, and writes about science, technology, nature, and history.
