“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.”
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
Context: He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. 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.
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Cormac McCarthy 270
American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter 1933Related quotes
“That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty”
Source: Snow Falling on Cedars
“Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one!”
“Translation:
Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one.”
Zwei Seelen und ein Gedanke,
Zwei Herzen und ein Schlag.
Der Sohn der Wildnis (1842), Act ii (published in English as Ingomar the Barbarian; translation by Maria Lovell), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Two friends, two bodies with one soul inspir’d", Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, Book xvi, line 267.; "’T was then we luvit ilk ither weel, ’T was then we twa did part: Sweet time—sad time! twa bairns at scule— Twa bairns and but ae heart", William Motherwell, Jeannie Morrison (c. 1832), Stanza 3.
Source: Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time (1975), p. 76
“Come, see the true
flowers
of this pained world.”
Source: On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
Context: He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. 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.