works-by-cormac-mccarthy

"She came from the shower wrapped in a towel and she sat on the bed and took his hand and looked down at him. I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot. He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave."

"I never knowed there was such a place as this. I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of."

"It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable."

"He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits."

"You think about all that stuff that can happen to you, he said. There aint no end to it."

"I dont see you holdin no aces."

"The old man … said … the notion that men can be understood was probably an illusion."

"He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realised that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know."

"There aint but one truth, said John Grady. The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody's mouth."

"He thought he'd be an object of some curiosity but the people he saw only nodded gravely to him and passed on. He carried the bucket back into the store and went down the street to where there was a small cafe and he entered and sat at one of the three small wooden tables. The floor of the cafe was packed mud newly swept and he was the only customer. He stood the rifle against the wall and ordered huevos revueltos and a cup of chocolate and he sat and waited for it to come and then he ate very slowly. The food was rich to his taste and the chocolate was made with canela and he drank it and ordered another and folded a tortilla and ate and watched the horses standing in the square across the street and watched the girls. They'd hung the gazebo with crepe and it looked like a festooned brush-pile. The proprietor showed him great courtesy and brought him fresh tortillas hot from the comal and told him that there was to be a wedding and that it would be a pity if it rained. He inquired where he might be from and showed surprise he'd come so far. He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all."

"Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason."

"When they went down to the bunkhouse for dinner the vaqueros seemed to treat them with a certain deference but whether it was the deference accorded the accomplished or that accorded to mental defectives they were unsure."

"....A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They’re always more trouble than what they’re worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done."

"Word gets around when the circus comes to town, dont it?"

"He said we were full of shit. But in a nice way."

"What good do you think it does to waller all over a horse thataway? said Rawlins. I dont know, said John Grady. I aint a horse."

"Digame, he said. Cuál es lo peor: Que soy pobre o que soy Americano? The vaquero shook his head. Una llave de oro abre cualquier puerta."

"You are the oveja negra, no? The black sheep?"

"He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."

"I cant back up and start over. But I dont see the point in slobberin over it. And I cant see where it would make me feel better to be able to point a finger at somebody else."

"It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood, and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change."

"Where is your country? he said. I don't know, said John Grady. I don't know where it is. I don't know what happens to country."

"Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole."

"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed."

"All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. here are the dead fathers. their spirit is entombed in the stone. [...] For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was these masons however primitive their works may seem to us."

"The hour that followed was a long hour."

"In three days they would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped on the river and slaughter them every soul."

"How many is there, John?. Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?"

"When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew [...]"

"You can’t be all Mexican. It’s like being all mongrel."

"In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was."

"But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book. My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all. [...] Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world."

"They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds."

"Where for aught any man know lies the locality of hell. For the Earth is a globe in a void the truth there's no up nor down to it."

"But ingratitude is more common than you might think."

"If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons."

"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. [...] Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments. [...] The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. [...] Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said. The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate."

"The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head."

"The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol enacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning."

"What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death."

"God dont lie. [...] And these are his words. [...] He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things."

"You dont know me, do ye? he said. The kid spat and squinted up at him. I know ye, he said. I'd know your hide in a tanyard."

"He pointed with his left hand and she turned to follow his hand with her gaze and he put the pistol to her head and fired. [...] He took a skinning knife from his belt and stepped to where the old woman lay and took up her hair and twisted it about his wrist and passed the blade of the knife about her skull and ripped away the scalp."

"Blood, he said. This country is give much blood. This Mexico. This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing."

"They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burn phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawnbroached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below."

"And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys."

"He had the pistols stuck in his belt at the back and he drew them one in each hand and he is as eitherhanded as a spider, he can write with both hands at a time and I've seen him to do it, and he commenced to kill indians. We needed no second invitation. Got it was a butchery. [...] Before the last poor nigger reached the bottom of the slop there was fifty-eight of them lay slaughtered among the gravels."

"The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. It's no fair accountin and I dont doubt but what he'd be the first to admit it and you put the query to him boldface."

"La gente dice que el coyote es un brujo. Muchas veces el brujo es un coyote."