Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

"I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing."

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."

"I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics."

"Sometimes you have a little problem and you dont fix it and then all of a sudden it aint a littleproblem anymore."

"you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation."

"You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn’t mine. It never has been."

"I aint sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they'd have to build a annex on to hell."

"She said: Sheriff how come you to let crime get so out of hand in your county? Sounded like a fair question I reckon. Maybe it was a fair question. Anyway I told her, I said: It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight."

"Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else."

"I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it."

"It takes very little to govern good people."

"The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. but I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It don't move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is."

"I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. 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. And then I woke up."

"Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact."

"Dope. They sell that shit to schoolkids. It's worse than that. How's that?Schoolkids buy it."

"Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change."

"I just meant maybe you could set here and drink one of em with me. He squinted at her. You ever notice how women have trouble takin no for a answer? I think itstarts about age three. What about men?They get used to it. They better."

"You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you."

"I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it."

"I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does."