Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West QUOTES

1 " The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

2 " The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

3 " He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

4 " Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

5 " War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

6 " It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

7 " All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That's your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

8 " Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

9 " This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

10 " This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

11 " If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

12 " Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

13 " Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

14 " whoever approaches his goal dances "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

15 " A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

16 " Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

17 " They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

18 " Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

19 " Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

20 " They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey. "

― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West