Cormac McCarthy © Derek Shapton

Biographile’s This Week in History remembers events of the past, and the icons that set them in motion. If the below isn't enough for you, read more inspiring author quotes.

Cormac McCarthy, born July 20, 1933, is the author of many acclaimed novels including (but certainly not limited to) The Road, No Country for Old Men, and All the Pretty Horses.

Though his birthday is smack dab in the middle of summer, his work is not light beach reading. He writes about tough people in tough places making life-altering decisions, and in writing about these subjects he dares readers to confront difficult truths in their own lives. Turns out that's precisely McCarthy's intent: Speaking in one of a handful of interviews, the somewhat reclusive author revealed that for all the inspiration he draws from literary titans like William Faulkner, he finds it hard to take authors who don't "deal with issues of life and death" seriously, even if those authors are Henry James or Marcel Proust.

Whether you agree or disagree with this standard, clearly, McCarthy has high standards for literature. In recognition of this hefty theme threaded throughout his work, for his birthday we have gathered some of his most intense quotes and convictions.

1. "There is no God and we are his prophets." (The Road, 2006)

2. "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." ("Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" The New York Times, 1992)

3. "Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death." (Outer Dark, 1968)

4. "Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them." (Blood Meridian, 1985)

5. "He reached down and tapped Suttree's knee with his forefinger. You, my good buddy, are a fourteen carat gold plated son of a bitch. That's what your problem is. And that being your problem, there's not a whole lot of people in sympathy with you. Or with your problem." (Suttree, 1979)

6. "Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." ("Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy" The Washington Post, 2009)

7. "I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away." (Outer Dark, 1968)

8. "It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong." (Child of God, 1973)

9. "It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it." (No Country for Old Men, 2005)

10. "How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it." (Suttree, 1979)

11. "The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full." (Blood Meridian, 1985)

12. "It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable." (All the Pretty Horses, 1992)

13. "The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all." (The Crossing, 1994)

14. "You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. (No Country for Old Men, 2005)