Cormac McCarthy

"In the end, all politics is local—it is about survival and power."

"Motivation fades. Only discipline remains."

"Every relationship is a negotiation between two separate worlds."

"Solitude teaches you who you really are without witnesses."

"Gratitude is the only appropriate response to existence."

"Creativity is the refusal to accept the world as given."

"Family is the first prison from which we seek to escape."

"Friendship is born when two people recognize themselves in each other."

"Happiness is a fleeting illusion that masters use to control the masses."

"Success is measured not in achievement but in the lives you've touched."

"The only real failure is to have loved and lost your way."

"Work without meaning is a kind of death in life."

"Humor is the last refuge of those who see too much."

"The natural world is beautiful precisely because it has no concern for us."

"Music is the language of souls who cannot speak."

"Science explains how things work. Philosophy explains why they matter."

"A man who does not love solitude cannot love freedom."

"The world is everything that is the case. What lies outside it is the problem of those who must live there."

"You can't make deals with things that are loyalty itself."

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."

"The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Half the lies are true and half the lies are false."

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

"The unfamiliar is not the incomprehensible, though the two are often confused."

"Anything that does not come from within is not worth having."

"Mostly he thought about death, as if by constant contemplation he might find in it some argument against its nature."

"The things of this world cannot be owned, only used for a time."

"People are afraid to have thoughts that don't conform to their world."

"All decisions made in the past are now present realities you must deal with."

"The secret to all victory lies in the organization of the nonobvious."

"Money is just congealed power, and those who create it control the world."