The Orchard Keeper QUOTES

1 " They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

2 " They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

3 " Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether. He listened. Above the black ranks of trees the mid-summer sky arched cloudless and coldly starred. He lay back and stared at it and after a while he slept. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

4 " Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth's crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth's wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with root, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

5 " And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

6 " In the dark glass where the road poured down their cigarettes rose and fell like distant semaphores above the soft green dawn of the dashlights. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

7 " Housecats is smart too. Smarter’n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain’t on account of you cain’t learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won’t learn nothin. They too smart. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

8 " They came three times for the old man. At first it was just the Sheriff and Gifford. They were one foot up the porch steps when he swung the door open and threw down on them and they could see the mule ears of the old shotgun laid back viciously along the locks. They turned and went back down the yard, not saying anything or even looking back, and the old man closed the door behind them. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

9 " They produced tobacco and papers and passed them to him not ceremoniously but with that deprecatory gesture of humility which country people confer in a look, a lift of the hand. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

10 " I could tell you why—and you stit wouldn’t know. That’s all right. You can set and ast a bunch of idjit questions. But not knowin a thing ain’t never made it not so. Well, I’m a old man and I’ve seen some hard times, so I don’t reckon Brushy Mountain’ll be the worst place I was ever in. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

11 " A man gets older, he said, he finds they’s lots of things he can do jest as well without and so he don’t have to worry about this and that the way a young feller will. I worked near all my life and never had nothin. Seems like a old man’d be allowed his rest but then he comes to find they’s things you have to do on account of nobody else wants to attend to em... Most ever man loves peace, he said, and none better than a old man. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

12 " The mountain road brick-red of dust laced with lizard tracks, coming up through the peach orchard, hot, windless, cloistral in a silence of no birds save one vulture hung in the smokeblue void of the sunless mountainside, rocking on the high updrafts, and the road turning and gated with bullbriers waxed and green, and the green cadaver grin sealed in the murky waters of the peach pit, slimegreen skull with newts coiled in the eyesockets and a wig of moss. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

13 " Then he sat very still with his hands on his knees, his shaggy head against the bricks, restored to patience and a look of tried inviolate sanctity, the faded blue eyes looking out down the row of cages, a forest of sweating iron dowels, forms of men standing or huddled upon their pallets, and the old man felt the circle of years closing, the final increment of the curve returning him again to the inchoate, the prismatic flux of sound and color wherein he had drifted once before and now beyond the world of men. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

14 " The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of the pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

15 " ...Mellungeons… their entire lives appeared devoted to the production of the ragged line of scions which shoeless and tattered sat for hours at a time on the porch edges, themselves not unlike the victims of some terrible disaster, and stared out across the blighted land with expressions of neither hope nor wonder nor despair. They came and went, unencumbered as migratory birds, each succeeding family a replica of the one before and only the names on the mailboxes altered, the new ones lettered crudely in above a rack of paint smears that obliterated the former occupants back into the anonymity from which they sprang. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

16 " I busted him and he busted me. That's fair ain't it?

No, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that thows it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it. More money in three hours than any workin man makes in a week. Why is that? Because it's harder work? No, because a man who makes a livin doin somethin that has to get him in jail sooner or later has to be paid for the jail, has to be paid in advance not jest for his time breakin the law but for the time he has to build when he gets caught at it. So I been paid. Gifford's been paid. Nobody owes nobody. If it wadn't for Gifford, the law, I wouldn't of had the job I had blockadin and if it wadn't for me blockadin, Gifford wouldn't of had his job arrestin blockaders. Now who owes who? "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

17 " Turkey buzzard, Warn explained. They’s the ones got red heads.
Where do you keep him?
Been keepin him in the smokehouse, he said.
Don’t nobody care for you to keep him?
Naw. The old lady set up a fuss but I told her I was goin to bring him in the house and learn him to set at table and that calmed her down some. Here, don’t get too close or he’ll puke on ye. He puked on Rock and Rock like to never got over it—stit won’t have nothin to do with him. Don’t nobody think much of him I reckon but me. I like him cause he’s about a mean son of a bitch and twice as ugly. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

18 " It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

19 " limestone lies about the eroded land like schools of sunning dolphin, gray channeled backs humped at the infernal sky. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper

20 " A man gets older, he said, he finds they's lots of things he can do jest as well without and so he don't have to worry about this and that the way a young feller will. I worked near all my life and never had nothin. Seems like a old man'd be allowed his rest but then he comes to find they's things you have to do on account of nobody else wants to attend to em. "

― Cormac McCarthy , The Orchard Keeper