All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1) QUOTES

161 " Es un país estupendo, ¿verdad?
Sí que lo es. Duérmete.
¿Compañero?
Dime.
Así es como era entre los habitantes primitivos, ¿verdad?
Sí.
¿Cuánto tiempo crees que te gustaría quedarte aquí?
Unos cien años. Duérmete. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

162 " They scarcely spoke all day. His father rode sitting forward slightly in the saddle, holding the reins in one hand about two inches above the saddlehorn. So thin and frail, lost in his clothes. Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he’d seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be. The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyways. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

163 " She aint worth it. None of em are.

He didnt answer for a while. Then he said: Yes they are. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

164 " ¿Has pensado alguna vez en la muerte?
Sí. A veces. ¿Y tú?
Sí. A veces. ¿Crees que existe un cielo?
Sí. ¿Tú no?
No lo sé. Quizá sí. ¿Crees que puedes creer en el cielo si no crees en el infierno?
Creo que puedes creer lo que quieras. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

165 " You’d be a woreout sumbuck. I’ll tell you that. Think how good you’d sleep. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

166 " He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

167 " They believed that someone must be looking for these things and would know how to value these things if only that person could be found. It was a faith that no disappointment seemed capable of shaking. What else had they? For what other thing would they abandon it? The industrial world was to them a thing unimaginable and those who inhabited it wholly alien to them. And yet they were not stupid. Never stupid. You could see it in the children. Their intelligence was frightening. And they had a freedom which we envied. There were so few restraints upon them. So few expectations. Then at the age of eleven or twelve they would cease being children. They lost their childhood overnight and they had no youth. They became very serious. As if some terrible truth had been visited upon them. Some terrible vision. At a certain point in their lives they were sobered in an instant and I was puzzled by this but of course I could not know what it was they saw. What it was they knew. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

168 " You never know when you’ll be in need of them you’ve despised, "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

169 " At a crossroads station somewhere on the other side of Paredon they picked up five farmworkers who climbed up on the bed of the truck and nodded and spoke to him with great circumspection and courtesy. It was almost dark and it was raining lightly and they were wet and their faces were wet in the yellow light from the station. They huddled forward of the chained engine and he offered them his cigarettes and they thanked him each and took one and they cupped their hands over the small flame against the falling rain and thanked him again.
De Donde viene? they said.
De Tejas.
Tejas, they said. Y donde va?
He drew on his cigarette. He looked at their faces. One of them older than the rest nodded at his cheap new clothes.
El va a ver a su novia, he said.
They looked at him earnestly and he nodded and said that it was true.
Ah, they said. Que bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the goodwill which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

170 " If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

171 " That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

172 " I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it. That the desire was the thing itself. The thing itself. I could think of nothing else of which that was true. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

173 " Those whom life does not cure death will. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

174 " 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. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

175 " But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

176 " ...he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life hidden from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

177 " they nodded solemnly and they were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

178 " He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind 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.

In four days' riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been…..The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment.

The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

179 " By midmorning eight of the horses stood tied and the other eight were wilder than deer, scattering along the fence and bunching and running in a rising sea of dust as the day warmed, coming to reckon slowly with the remorselessness of this rendering of their fluid and collective selves into that condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague. The entire complement of vaqueros had come from the bunkhouse to watch and by noon all sixteen of the mestenos were standing about in the potrero sidehobbled to their own hackamores and faced about in every direction and all communion among them broken. They looked like animals trussed up by children for fun and they stood waiting for they knew not what with the voice of the breaker still running in their brains like the voice of some god come to inhabit them. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

180 " I began to see how the world must become if I were to live in it. "

― Cormac McCarthy , All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)