Quotes from book

Blood Meridian

“I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.”

“I could have been somebody in this world wasn’t for him.”

“In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.”

“The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.”

“My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.”

“Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.”

“…hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy.”

“For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”

“Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.”

“Where is yesterday? … And where is the fiddler and where is the dance?”

“The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol enacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.”

“What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It’s a great thing, the dance.”

“Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”

“He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”

“Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee.”

“People see what they want to see.”

“…death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape.”

“I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky. —John Joel Glanton.”

“Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them”