The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

Is history about money? Until you had money you didnt have history. How’s that?

She told me once when I was in a suicidal snit that there are certain dispensations for those who survive their own reviling.

You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves.

Let me ask you something. Ask. Could you have guessed your life? Hardly a day of it.

I have to go. Okay. Are you all right? No. Are you? No. But we’re on reduced expectations. That helps.

The thing about the Kennedys was that they had no way to grasp the inappeasable war-ethic of the Sicilians. The Kennedys were Irish and they thought that you won by talking.

The point is that the more that emotion is tied up in an incident the less likely is any narration of it going to be accurate.

Find me an instance of a man saying that he was a patsy who wasnt one. Anyway, the notion that anyone would conspire with a halfwit like Oswald to actually assassinate a sitting president is ludicrous on the face of it. They didnt expect that he would even hit Kennedy. That was just a fluke.

have a feeling that the shape of your interior life is something you believe somehow exempts you from other considerations.

He commented to a mutual friend that I was going to find myself consigned to such deeps of the netherworld that you couldnt find me with an asbestos bloodhound.

The child’s brain the day before its birth is the same brain as the day after. But everything else is different.

There’s a lot of stuff I havent told you. I know. How do you know? You’re kidding. All right. I think I’m about to become someone else. It’s about time. Western smiled.

Sheddan once said that evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure.

Anyway, dont speak to me of God. We are no longer friends.

A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.

I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost. It’s not that I love paradoxes. It’s just that they’ve increasingly come to seem the last factual reality.

that I’ve always grudgingly admired the way in which you carried bereavement to such high station. The elevation of grief to a status transcending that which it sorrows. No, Squire. Hear me out. It’s the idea of loss. It subsumes the class of all possible lost things. It’s our primal fear, and you get to assign to it what you will. It doesnt invade your life. It was always there. Awaiting your indulgence. Awaiting your concession.

It must surely be true that there is no such collective domain of joy as there is of sorrow. You cant be sure that another man’s happiness resembles your own. But where the collective of pain is concerned there can be little doubt at all.

To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it.

One cant speak for the dead. Who knows their lives? In any case it is the nature of people to imagine that the defeated must have done something to deserve their undoing. People want the world to be just. But the world is silent on this subject. To win a war or a revolution does not validate the cause.

He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death.

Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.