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

by Cormac McCarthy

So thin and frail, lost in his clothes. Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he’d seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

You dont look like the demon rum’s dealt kindly with you. My head feels like a fat lady’s sat on it. John Grady looked out at the morning desert shining in the new sun. He looked at the boy. You’ve wore Rawlins completely out. I reckon you know that. You never know when you’ll be in need of them you’ve despised, said Blevins.

Hahaha. And then also: wow

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I’d made before it.

Rawlins put the knife in his pocket and sat inspecting his hat for nopal stickers. 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.

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.

They listened with great attention as John Grady answered their questions and they nodded solemnly and they were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.

My feelin is that any horse broke in four days is liable to come unbroke in four more.

Digame, he said. Cuál es lo peor: Que soy pobre o que soy americano? The vaquero shook his head. Una llave de oro abre cualquier puerta, he said.

leaned back in the chair and sat with his arm upright and the burning cigarette a few inches from his ear in a posture that seemed alien to him. As if perhaps he’d admired it somewhere in others.

Poser

Why he come here to steal horses? It was his horse. The captain leaned back, smoking. The horse is not his horse. Well, you have it your own ignorant way.

The prisoners looked up at him, they looked at his feet, they looked away. He stood watching them for a long time. They all seemed to be waiting for something. Like passengers in a halted train. Yet the captain inhabited another space and it was a space of his own election and outside the common world of men. A space privileged to men of the irreclaimable act which while it contained all lesser worlds within it contained no access to them. For the terms of election were of a piece with its office and once chosen that world could not be quit.

The prison was no more than a small walled village and within it occurred a constant seethe of barter and exchange in everything from radios and blankets down to matches and buttons and shoenails and within this bartering ran a constant struggle for status and position. Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill.

I intend to make em kill me. I wont take nothin less. They either got to kill us or let us be. There aint no middle ground.

John Grady grinned. You see that big old boy standin yonder that’s been watchin us? I see the son of a bitch. See him lookin over here? I see him. What do you think I’m fixin to do? I got no idea in this world. I’m goin to get up from here and walk over there and bust him in the mouth. The hell you are. You watch me. What for? Just to save him the trip.

I knew when I bought the knife what I’d bought it for. I dont see where you were wrong. The cigarette glowed, it faded. I know, he said. But you didnt do it.

Well, said Rawlins. I reckon I’ll see you one of these days. You take care. Yeah. You take care. He turned and handed his ticket to the driver and the driver punched it and handed it back and he climbed stiffly aboard. John Grady stood watching while he passed along the aisle. He thought he’d take a seat at the window but he didnt. He sat on the other side of the bus and John Grady stood for a while and then turned and walked back out through the station to the street and walked slowly back through the rain to the hotel.

He thought perhaps if he dreamt of him enough he’d go away forever and be dead among his kind and the grass scissored in the wind at his ear and he fell asleep and dreamt of nothing at all.

Nice. Too many authors use dreaming as foreshadowing

I was seventeen and this country to me was like a rare vase being carried about by a child. There was an electricity in the air. Everything seemed possible. I thought that there were thousands like us. Like Francisco. Like Gustavo. There were not. Finally in the end it seemed there were none.

Is she bitter or wise?

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.

His trust in the basic goodness of humankind became his undoing. At one point Gustavo brought General Huerta to him at gunpoint and denounced him as a traitor but Francisco would not hear of it and reinstated him.

That's not trust it's naivete

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 repeated what his father had once told him, that scared money cant win and a worried man cant love.

Dont cry. I’ll make it right. You cant, she said. She raised her eyes and looked at him. He’d never seen despair before. He thought he had, but he had not.

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

he dreamt of horses and the horses in his dream moved gravely among the tilted stones like horses come upon an antique site where some ordering of the world had failed and if anything had been written on the stones the weathers had taken it away again and the horses were wary and moved with great circumspection carrying in their blood as they did the recollection of this and other places where horses once had been and would be again. Finally what he saw in his dream was that the order in the horse’s heart was more durable for it was written in a place where no rain could erase it.

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.