Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses (1992)

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Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

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

Cormac McCarthy
A good looking horse is like a good looking 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.

Cormac McCarthy
You think about all that stuff that can happen to you, he said. There ain't no end to it.

Cormac McCarthy
My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.

Cormac McCarthy
Long before morning 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 is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.

Cormac McCarthy
Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites 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.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.

Cormac McCarthy
I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

Cormac McCarthy