Quotes from book
All the Pretty Horses
All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award
“The old man … said … the notion that men can be understood was probably an illusion.”
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
“It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.”
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
“You think about all that stuff that can happen to you, he said. There aint no end to it.”
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
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.
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.
