Cormac McCarthy

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 [...]

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.

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

The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons, coins, men. His hands moved as if he were pulling something from one fist in a series of elongations. Watch the coin, Davey, he said.

The hour that followed was a long hour.

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.

I could have been somebody in this world wasn’t for him.

The cat simply disappeared. There was no blood or cry, it just vanished.

The horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

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

How many is there, John?.

Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?

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.