The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2)

by Cormac McCarthy

they smoked the way poor people eat which is a form of prayer.

Rightly heard all tales are one.

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons.

he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart’s memory

He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.

She said that in every family there is one who is different and the others believe that they know that person but they do not know that person.

He could hear the horse step in its hobbles and hear the grass rip softly in the horse’s mouth and hear it breathing or the toss of its tail and he saw far to the south beyond the Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.