Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian (1985)

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See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.

Cormac McCarthy
The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings outstretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops.

Cormac McCarthy
The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves.

Cormac McCarthy
In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.

Cormac McCarthy
The judge looked about him. He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and his hands rested palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping.

Cormac McCarthy
Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.

Cormac McCarthy
I could have been somebody in this world wasn't for him.

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

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

Cormac McCarthy
For the Earth is a globe in a void the truth there's no up nor down to it.

Cormac McCarthy
Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments. — The judge.

Cormac McCarthy
His among the clouded faces seemed unperturbed. He looked over the Americans, their gear. In truth, they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadn't drunk.

Cormac McCarthy
I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky. —John Joel Glanton.

Cormac McCarthy
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos. — The judge.

Cormac McCarthy
They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.

Cormac McCarthy
A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.

Cormac McCarthy
The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. — The judge

Cormac McCarthy
When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

Cormac McCarthy
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

Cormac McCarthy
I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.

Cormac McCarthy
… and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be.

Cormac McCarthy
... death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape.

Cormac McCarthy
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.

Cormac McCarthy
All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.

Cormac McCarthy
Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them

Cormac McCarthy
What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It's a great thing, the dance.

Cormac McCarthy
He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

Cormac McCarthy
They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.

Cormac McCarthy