He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he?
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who suffer from it, plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about it. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
— Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary
An ancient philosopher, expounding his conviction that life is no better than death, was asked by a disciple why, then, he did not die. “Because,” he replied, “death is no better than life. It is longer.”
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
