Home > Work > Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
61 " His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turnings will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. "
― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
62 " 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 a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. "
63 " See the child. "
64 " Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all. "
65 " Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said "
66 " The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded. All the sky seemed troubled and night came quickly over the evening land and small gray birds flew crying softly after the fled sun. He chucked up the horse. He passed and so passed all into the problematical destruction of darkness. "
67 " Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings. "
68 " when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. "
69 " All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. "
70 " They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers. "
71 " For this will to deceive that is in thing luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies "
72 " Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs. "
73 " The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. "
74 " A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled. Books lie, he said. God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. "
75 " For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it? "
76 " The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. "
77 " The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. "
78 " They rode in a narrow enfillade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bakeoven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god. "
79 " 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. "
80 " and when he saw the kid standing there looking looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world. "