All The Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

You still seein that Barnett girl? He shook his head. She quit you or did you quit her? I dont know. That means she quit you. Yeah.

Your mother and me never agreed on a whole lot. She liked horses. I thought that was enough. That’s how dumb I was. She was young and I thought she’d outgrow some of the notions she had but she didnt. Maybe they were just notions to me. It wasnt just the war. We were married ten years before the war come along. She left out of here. She was gone from the time you were six months old till you were about three. I know you know somethin about that and it was a mistake not to of told you. We separated. She was in California. Luisa looked after you. Her and Abuela. He looked at the boy and he looked out the window again. She wanted me to go out there, he said. Why didnt you? I did. I didnt last long at it. The boy nodded. She come back because of you, not me. I guess that’s what I wanted to say. Yessir.

My daddy run off from home when he was fifteen. Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama. You wouldnt of been born at all. What makes you say that? Cause your mama’s from San Angelo and he never would of met her. He’d of met somebody. So would she. So? So you wouldnt of been born. I dont see why you say that. I’d of been born somewheres. How? Well why not? If your mama had a baby with her other husband and your daddy had one with his other wife which one would you be? I wouldnt be neither of em. That’s right. Rawlins lay watching the stars. After a while he said: I could still be born. I might look different or somethin. If God wanted me to be born I’d be born. And if He didnt you wouldnt. You’re makin my goddamn head hurt. I know it. I’m makin my own. They lay watching the stars.

You never know when you’ll be in need of them you’ve despised, said Blevins.

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. Where’d you hear that at? I dont know.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?

They put Mexican blood in me, he said. He looked up. John Grady was lighting a cigarette. He shook out the match and put it in the ashtray and looked at Rawlins. So. So what does that mean? said Rawlins. Mean about what? Well does it mean I’m part Mexican? John Grady drew on the cigarette and leaned back and blew the smoke into the air. Part Mexican? he said. Yeah. How much did they put? They said it was over a litre. How much over a litre? I dont know. Well a litre would make you almost a halfbreed. Rawlins looked at him. It dont, does it? he said. No. Hell, it dont mean nothin. Blood’s blood. It dont know where it come from.

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 and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness.

That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group—bacteria, mice, people—and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist to gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.