Quotes from The Orchard Keeper

Cormac McCarthy ·  256 pages

Rating: (6.4K votes)


“They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper


“Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether. He listened. Above the black ranks of trees the mid-summer sky arched cloudless and coldly starred. He lay back and stared at it and after a while he slept.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper


“And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper


“Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth's crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth's wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with root, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper


“They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper



“In the dark glass where the road poured down their cigarettes rose and fell like distant semaphores above the soft green dawn of the dashlights.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper


“I busted him and he busted me. That's fair ain't it?

No, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that thows it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it. More money in three hours than any workin man makes in a week. Why is that? Because it's harder work? No, because a man who makes a livin doin somethin that has to get him in jail sooner or later has to be paid for the jail, has to be paid in advance not jest for his time breakin the law but for the time he has to build when he gets caught at it. So I been paid. Gifford's been paid. Nobody owes nobody. If it wadn't for Gifford, the law, I wouldn't of had the job I had blockadin and if it wadn't for me blockadin, Gifford wouldn't of had his job arrestin blockaders. Now who owes who?”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper


“Housecats is smart too. Smarter’n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain’t on account of you cain’t learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won’t learn nothin. They too smart.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper


“Well, I’ll tell ye, they ain’t no more heroes. The”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Orchard Keeper


About the author

Cormac McCarthy
Born place: in Providence, Rhode Island, The United States
Born date July 20, 1933
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Popular quotes

“إن النفس الحزينة المتألمة تجد راحة بانضمامها الى نفس أخرى تماثلها بالشعور وتشاركها بالإحساس مثلما يستأنس الغريب بالغريب في أرض بعيدة عن وطنهما
- فالقلوب التي تدنيها أوجاع الكآبة بعضها من بعض لا تفرقها بهجة الأفراح وبهرجتها. فرابطة الحزن أقوى في النفوس من روابط الغبطة والسرور. والحب الذي تغسله العيون بدموعها يظلّ طاهراً وجميلاً وخالداً.”
― Kahlil Gibran, quote from The Broken Wings


“I can hardly bear to think of ourselves hugging and crying and making giggly phone calls, like we were in some inane sitcom. We actually discussed names. Names! I want to shout back through the years at myself, "Just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you get a baby, you idiots!”
― Liane Moriarty, quote from What Alice Forgot


“How many more burdens do you think you can bear alone? How many more years can I go on alone, without you? Our days are filled from dawn to dusk, honey, but our lives are empty.”
― Leila Meacham, quote from Roses


“All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower


“People aren't just people, they are people surrounded by circumstances.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from I Shall Wear Midnight


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