Cities of the Plain (The Border Trilogy, #3)

by Cormac McCarthy

To the south the distant lights of the city lay strewn across the desert floor like a tiara laid out upon a jeweler’s blackcloth.

But the old woman said that some have no choice. She said that for the poor any choice was a gift with two faces.

Then it was quiet. It was quiet in the house and it was quiet in the country about. He sat smoking. The cooling stove ticked. Far away in the hills behind the house a coyote called.

And it had always seemed to me that somethin can live and die but that the kind of thing that they were was always there. I didnt know you could poison that. I aint heard a wolf howl in thirty odd years.

What’s this we shit? You got a rat in your pocket?

Yessir. Was that when you quit drinkin? No. I was more dedicated than that. I quit and took it up again. Quit and took it up. Finally got around to quittin all together. Maybe I just got too old for it. There wasnt any virtue in it. The drinkin or the quittin? Either one. There aint no virtue in quittin what you aint able any longer to do in the first place.

The last of the colors died in the west. The sky was dark and blue. Then just dark. The kitchen windowlights lay across the porch boards beside them where they sat.

a thing once set in motion has no ending in this world until the last witness has passed.

Leaving bloody footprints in the carpet as if a penitent had passed.

I never played that much poker. My daddy was a poker player. He always said that the problem with poker was you played with two kinds of money. What you won was gravy but what you lost was hard come by.

such is the recklessness of those whom God has been so good as to shield from their just share of adversity in this world.

When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way to show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet it is all we have.

Our decisions do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The log of the world is composed of its entries, but it cannot be divided back into them.