The Passenger Quotes

“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Mercy is in the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

p.116”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Dont close your eyes.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“It’s just that sometimes I think I would have found my life pretty funny if I hadnt had to live it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“So how bad is the world?
How bad. The world's truth constitutes a /vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the Earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom?

p.377”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry for a thousand years.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“History is a collection of paper. A few fading recollections. After a while what is not written never happened.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never
understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife - and I pray most fervently that there is not - I can only hope that they wont sing. Be of good cheer, Squire. This was the ongoing adjuration of the early Christians and in this at least they were right. You know that I've always thought your history unnecessarily embittered. Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.

p.347”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I feel old, Squire. Every conversation is about the past.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Listen, Ducklescence, he whispered. You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet. And now, good night.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as we once were and yet we mourn the days.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“The truth is that everyone is under arrest. Or soon will be. They dont have to restrict your movements. They just have to know where you are.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“In my experience people who say no matter what seldom know what what might turn out to be. They dont know how bad what might get. I’ll see you.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagined.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“God was not interested in our theology but only in our silence.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death. To that I have no answer.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“To win a war or a revolution does not validate the cause.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“You might think that fingerprints and numbers give you a distinct identity. But soon there will be no identity so distinct as simply to have none.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I think people regret what they didnt do more than what they did. I think everbody has things they failed to do. You cant see what is coming, Bobby. And if you could it is no guarantee you’d make the right choice even then. I believe in God’s design.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger