The Passenger (The Passenger #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

What the Squire has never understood is that forgiveness has a time line. While it’s never too late for revenge.

Lastly she said that God was not interested in our theology but only in our silence.

But have you in fact looked around you lately? I think you know how dumb a person is with an IQ of one hundred. Western regarded him warily. I suppose, he said. Well half the people are dumber than that. Where do you imagine all this is going?

I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine.

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.

Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagined. Boredom.

When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced.

But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

She spoke her virgin sins through the wicket. Once. Again. And then no more. Hell hung on longer. She saw the resurrect vomited up from the pit to wander vacanteyed and smoking through the streets. Blinking in the unaccustomed light. She woke from dreams of struggle. Of leaden flight.

beauty has power to call forth a grief that is beyond the reach of other tragedies. The loss of a great beauty can bring an entire nation to its knees. Nothing else can do that. Helen. Or Marilyn.

I think the idea that the government of the United States of America routinely assassinates its citizens is something of a paranoid fantasy among certain political groups. I would agree with that. Unless you’re one of those selected for assassination.

When smart people do dumb things it’s usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear. They want something they’re not supposed to have or they’ve done something they werent supposed to do. In either case they’ve usually fastened on to a set of beliefs that are supportive of their state of mind but at odds with reality. It has become more important to them to believe than to know.

Electronic money. Sooner rather than later. Okay. There wont be any actual money. Just transactions. And every transaction will be a matter of record. Forever.

On that cheery note. On that cheery note. He walked down the street and crossed the railroad tracks. The redness of the evening in the glass of the buildings. Very high a small and trembling flight of geese. Fording the last of the day in the thin air. Following the shape of the river below. He stood above the bank of riprap. Rock and broken paving. The slow coil of the passing water. In the coming night he thought that men would band together in the hills. Feeding their small fires with the deeds and the covenants and the poetry of their fathers. Documents they’d no gift to read in a cold to loot men of their souls.

She knelt in her nightshift at the feet of the Logos itself, he said. And begged for light or darkness but not this endless nothing.

Kant had it right about the stars above and the truth within. The last light the nonbeliever will see will not be the dimming of the sun. It will be the dimming of God.

History is a collection of paper. A few fading recollections. After a while what is not written never happened.

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. I suppose that’s hardly a novel observation.

When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom?

Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.