McCarthy, Cormac.The Crossing. Kindle Edition. 1994.

“When their father was done he looked up. His eyes were very blue and very beautiful half hid away in the leathery seams of his face. As if there were something there that the hardness of the country had not been able to touch.” (location 231)

“In the jars dark liquids. Dried viscera. Liver, gall, kidneys. The inward parts of the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood.”  (location 239)

“Echols one time told me that tryin to get the best of a wolf is like tryin to get the best of a kid. It aint that they’re smarter. It’s just that they aint got all that much else to think about.” (location 388)

“The lights of the town strewn across the prairie lay in that blue vale like a jeweled serpent incandescing in the evening cool.” (location 714)

“The snow on the north slopes so pale. Like spaces left for messages.” (location 721)

“Who can dream of God? This man did. In his dreams God was much occupied. Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could see Him bent at his work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of his own presence. Weaving the world. In his hands it flowed out of nothing and in his hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly. So. Here was a God to study.” (location 2211)

“A God who seemed a slave to his own selfordinated duties.” (location 2213)

“A low door connected them and in the corner of the second room was a fireplace and a small altar with a Virgin of painted wood. A jar that held dead weeds. A drinking glass in the bottom of which lay a medallion of blackened wax. Against the wall stood a contrivance of poles lashed together into a frame and webbed with strips of rawhide with the hair on. It had the look of some rude agrarian implement but was in fact a bed. He blew out the match and walked out and stood in the door. Boyd was sitting on the stoop watching the girl. She was at the watering trough at the far end of the compound holding the horses while they drank. She and the two horses and the dog were surrounded by a semicircle of sitting dogs of every stripe and color but she paid them no mind. She stood very patiently with the horses while they drank. While they raised their dripping mouths and looked about and while they drank again. She did not touch the horses nor talk to them. She just waited while they drank and they drank for a long time.” (location 3231)

“Boyd put the last corner of the taco in his mouth and sat chewing. What do you reckon is in these tacos? he said. Cats. Cats? Sure. You see how the dog was lookin at you? They aint done it, said Boyd. You see any cats in the street? It’s too hot for cats in the street. You see any in the shade? There could be some laid up in the shade somewheres. How many cats have you seen anywheres? You wouldnt eat a cat, Boyd said. Even to get to watch me eat one. I might. No you wouldnt. I would if I was hungry enough. You aint that hungry. I was pretty hungry. Wasnt you? Yeah. I aint now. We aint eat no cats have we? No. Would you know it if we had? Yeah. You would too.” (location 3844)

“Si el mundo es ilusión la pérdida del mundo es ilusión también.” (location 4233)

****”He prodded the ashes with a stick. The few red coals that turned up in the fire’s black heart seemed secret and improbable. Like the eyes of things disturbed that had best been left alone.” (location 4876)

“along those unseen corridors writ in their blood a hundred thousand years.” (location 4924)

“The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again.” (location 5815)

“He said that in any case the past was little more than a dream and its force in the world greatly exaggerated. For the world was made new each day and it was only men’s clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more.” (location 6169)

“In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased.”  (location 6205)

an old dog “so scarred and broken that it might have been patched up out of parts of dogs by demented vivisectionists.” (location 6362)

Read February/March, 2014