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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.