Cormac McCarthy

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

“But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothin' would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know better'n that. I've thought about it a good deal. . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don't have no intentions of carvin' a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.”

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”

“If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”

“Cuando sueñes con un mundo que nunca existió o con un mundo que no existirá y estés contento otra vez entonces te habrás rendido. ¿Lo entiendes? Y no puedes rendirte. Yo no lo permitiré.”

“Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes.”

“Pensó que cada recuerdo evocado debe violentar en alguna medida sus orígenes. Como en un juego. El juego del teléfono. Más vale ser parco. Lo que uno altera mediante el recuerdo tiene sin embargo una realidad, sea o no conocida.”

“Salió a la gris luz y se quedó allí de pie y fugazmente vio la verdad absoluta del mundo. El frío y despiado girar de la tierra intestada. Oscuridad implacable. Los perros ciegos del sol en su carrera. El aplastante vacío negro del universo. Y en alguna parte dos animales perseguidos temblando como zorros escondidos en su madriguera. Tiempo prestado y mundo prestado y ojos prestados con que llorarlo.”

“Como si el mundo se encogiera en torno a un núcleo de entidades desglosables. Las cosas cayendo en el olvido y con ellas sus nombres. Los colores. Los nombres de los pájaros. Alimentos. Por último los nombres de las cosas que uno creía verdaderas. Más frágiles de lo que él habría pensado. Cuánto de ese mundo había desaparecido ya? El sagrado idioma desprovisto de sus refrentes y por tanto de su realidad. Rebajado como algo que intenta preservar su calor. A tiempo para desaparecer para siempre en un abrir y cerrar de ojos.”

“los sueños correctos para un hombre en peligro eran sueños de peligro y que lo demás era sólo la llamada de la languidez y de la muerte.”

“Algunas cosas las olvidas, no? Olvidas lo que quieres recordar y recuerdas lo que quieres olvidar.”

“Como el primer síntoma de un galucoma frío enpañando al mundo.”

“When you’re a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be, Billy said. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you just wind up tryin to minimize the pain. Anyway this country aint the same. Nor anything in it. The war changed everthing. I dont think people even know it yet.”

“The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein convinced that it's all that good a thing.”

“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse”

“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”

“Carry the fire.”

“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.”

“Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”

“Teaching writing is a hustle.”

“We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we?No. Of course not.Even if we were starving?We're starving now.You said we werent.I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving.But we wouldnt.No. We wouldnt.No matter what.No. No matter what.Because we're the good guys.Yes.And we're carrying the fire.And we're carrying the fire. Yes.Okay.”

“Where men can't live gods fare no better.”

“Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.”

“He'd watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.”

“They rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain again. In that gray storm light they crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea whereon they trod miraculous. They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood.”

“Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone.She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.”

“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”

“For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.”

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”

“I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.”

“It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.”

“and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.”

“Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them.”

“Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.”

“Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.”

“Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”

“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”

“She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.”

“The following night she came to his bed and she came every night for nine nights running, pushing the door shut and latching it and turning in the slatted light at God knew what hour and stepping out of her clothes and sliding cool and naked against him in the narrow bunk all softness and perfume and the lushness of her black hair falling over him and no caution to her at all. Saying I dont care I dont care. Drawing blood with her teeth where he held the heel of his hand against her mouth that she not cry out.”

“You know that the things you put it your head stay there, right?''Yeah. But you remember some things, don't you?''Yeah. You remember the things you want to forget and forget the things you want to remember.”

“When you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”

“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.”

“A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.”

“My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you.”

“He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him.”

“The skiff swung gently, drifting in the current. He undid his shirt to the waist and put one forearm to his eyes. He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face”

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”

“when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

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

“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. ”