All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

• What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them.
• Let's not have a funeral till we got somethin to bury.
• Some things in this world cant be helped.
• He'd the notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not.
• People dont feel safe no more.
• If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways.
• If you dont like to be laughed at dont fall on your ass.
• I dont see how you can say somebody is just flat out the best.
• You never know when you'll be in need of them you've despised.
• Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.
• A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.
• You think you can believe in heaven if you dont believe in hell? I guess you can believe what you want to.
• You think God looks out for people? Yeah. I guess He does. You? Yeah. I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you're done there's wars and ruination and all hell. You dont know what's goin to happen. I'd say He's just about got to. I dont believe we'd make it a day otherwise.
• Like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.
• No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.
• They have a long life, dreams. I have dreams now which I had as a young girl. They have an odd durability for something not quite real.
• Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten.
• The names of the entities that have power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity.
• In an ideal world the gossip of the idle would be of no consequence. But I have seen the consequences in the real world and they can be very grave indeed.
• There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot.
• What is sacred is sacred. The powers of the priest are more limited than people suppose.
• There is no greater monster than reason.
• You dont get to go back and pick some time when the trouble started and then lay everything off on your friend.
• 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.
• Some things aint reasonable.
• I dont believe in signing on just till it quits suitin you. You either stick or you quit.
• There aint but one truth. The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody's mouth.
• I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.
• He realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.
• All my life I had the feelin that trouble was close at hand. Not that I was about to get into it. Just that is was always there.
• Dying aint in people's plans, is it?
• Blood's blood. It dont know where it come from.
• I guess if I done anything real bad I'd rather not tell it.
• I wouldnt be here if I wasnt supposed to be here.
• You dont need to try and make it right. It is what it is.
• Corn grows by the will of God and beyond that will there is neither corn nor growing nor light nor air nor rain nor anything at all save only darkness.
• A man leaves much when he leaves his own country.
• What is done cannot be undone.
• 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 face. Because otherwise we are nothing.
• 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.
• 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 and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness.
• If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that cold not change. No matter what.
• All courage was a form of constancy. It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily. Courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it.
• So much depends on luck.
• His trust in the basic goodness of humankind became his undoing.
• 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 the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
• In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont 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.
• If she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all.
• I've no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favor?
• I've known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people.
• If fate is the law then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It's in our nature.
• Scared money cant win and a worried man cant love.
• 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 on 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 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.
• 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.
• The trouble with a liar is he cant remember what he said.
• Maybe the best thing to do might be just to go on and put it behind you. My daddy used to tell me not to chew on somethin that was eatin you.
• There's a purpose for everything in this world. Sometimes it might be hard to see what it is.

4/25/2007