Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” Quotes (49 Quotes)

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

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.

I don't see you holdin no aces.

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all. And by true I do not mean what is righteous but merely what is so.

Son, not everbody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven.

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.

I'd rather to make a good run as a bad stand.

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 anyway. 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.

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

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. Sometimes I think we are all like that myopic coiner at his press, taking the blind slugs one by one from the tray, all of us bent so jealously at our work, determined that not even chaos be outside of our own making.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

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. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.

The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein convinced that it's all that good a thing.

He looked into those blue eyes like a man seeking some vision of the increate future of the universe.

I'm double bred for death by fire.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

He said that 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.

In history there are no control groups.

There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.

In the spaniards heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love for truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.

There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to holo

It just bothered me that you might think I'm somethin special. I aint.

They had no curiousity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting our or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.

They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddle legged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound theyÆd ever heard before. In the grey twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.

He thought perhaps if he dreamt of him enough he'd go away forever and be dead among his kind

John Grady looked at the table. The paper cat stepped thin and slant among the shapes of cats thereon. He looked up again. Yessir, he said. Just me and him.

We're like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We don't know what's goin to show up here come daylight. We don't even know what color they'll be.

He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.

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.

You never know when you'll be in need of them you've despised,

A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.

You think God looks out for people?...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 don't know what's goin to happen. I'd say He's just about go to. I don't believe we'd make it a day otherwise.

Ah, they said. Qu? 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 good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to hear men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you.

Because 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 fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

I dont know what happens to country.

Scared money canÆt win and a worried man canÆt love.