The Road - Cormac McCarthy

« Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. »

« With tht first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. »

« He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said : If he is not the word of God God never spoke. »

« If only my heart were stone. »

« You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget. »

« The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. »

« He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what ? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must. »

« He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. »

« The grainy air. The taste of it never left your mouth. They stood in the rain like farm animals. »

« Ever’s a long time. »

« A tangle of dead lilac. »

« Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground. »

« If you break little promises you’ll break big ones. »

« A rich southern wood that once held mayapple and pipsissewa. Ginseng. The raw dead limbs of the rhododendron twisted and knotted and black. »

« He’d stood at such a river once and watched the flash of trout deep in a pool, invisible to see in the teacolored water except as they turned on their sides to feed. Reflecting back the sun deep in the darkness like a flash of knives in a cave. »

« But there’s not any more states ?

No. »

« The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again. »

« He was as burntlooking as the country, his clothing scorched and black. One of his eyes was  burnt shut and his hair was but a nitty wig of ash upon his blackened skull. »

« What in God’s name are you talking about ? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film. »

« I dont care. It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes he is. »

« She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. »

« The hunderd nights they’d sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall. »

« Always so deliberate, hardly surprised by the most outlandish advents. A creation perfectly evolved to meet its own end. »

« Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup. »

« This is my child, he said. I washed a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire. »

« So cold. It could be November. It coudl be later. »

« He rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the backs of his hands. »

« The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed. »

« If you’re on the lookout all the time does that mean that you’re scared all the time ? Well I suppose you have to be scared enough to be on the lookout in the first place. To be cautious. Watchful. »

« Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from  planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. »

« He’d planned to leave but the rain was justification enough to stay. »

« The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark of the yard like a grave yawning at judgement day in some old apocalyptic painting. »

« He looked like a pile of rags fallen of a cart. »

« Grayblue eyes half buried in the thin and sooty creases of his skin. »

« What’s your name ?Ely. Ely what ? What’s wrong with Ely ? »

« Sitting like a starved and threadbare buddha, staring into the coals. »

« People were always getting ready for tomorow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. »

« Beggars cant be choosers. »

« When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too. »

« There is no God and we are his prophets. »

« the less said the better. »

« So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true. »

« When he looked back the old man had set out with his cane, tapping his way, dwindling slowly on the road behind them like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever. »

« He’d pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived. Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory. »

« The leaves were soft from the recent rains and quite underfoot. »

« The warming house creaked and groaned. Like a thing being called out of long hibernation. »

« Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. »

« We’re beachcombers, he said. What is that ? It’s people who walk along the beach looking for things of value that might have washed up. »

« Still there was something perverse in his searching. Like exhausting the least likely places first when looking for something lost. »

« There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead. »

« Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie. »

« The pitted iron hardware deep lilac in color »

« What’s the bravest thing you ever did ? He spat into the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said. »

« He turned and looked at the boy. Standing with his suitcase like an orphan waiting for a bus. »

« He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. »

« In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. »

The Road – Cormac McCarthy