Quotes from "All the Pretty Horses"

          If you're into old westerns, you'll like this book. If you're from Texas, you'll like this book. If you're from or identify strongly with Mexico, you'll love this book. I'm not one to say that a book changed my life, but this book changed my life, even if it was only a little. 
           If you're not into reading, but into movies and Matt Damon, there's a movie based on the book. I've never seen it, but I tend to have a little faith in Mr. Damon.
          Anyway, these are a few of my favorite quotes from this book. I have to warn you, though. Some of these are pretty deep and might make you question your whole existence. Read them anyway, maybe they'll convince you to read the book.

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The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein convinced that it's all that good a thing. 

He'd notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not. There was nothing in it at all. 

All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. 

"What'd I ever done to you?" he said.
"You aint done nothin to me. And you aint goin to. That's the point."

"What if this is just talk? Everything's talk isnt it?"
"Not everything."

"I'm going to tell you somethin.
"Tell it." 
"I could get used to this life."
He drew on the cigarette and held it out to one side and tapped the ask with a delicate motion of his forefinger. "It wouldnt take me no time at all."

"They probably think we've gone crazy." 
"Aint we?"

"You think God look out for people?" said Rawlins.
"Yeah. I guess He does. You?"
"Yeah. I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze in Arkansas or some damn place and before you're done there's wars and ruination and all hell. You dont know what's goin to happen. I'd say He's just about got to. I dont believe we'd make it a day otherwise."

"A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman," he said. "They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man need is just on that will get the job done."

He was still looking down the road where she'd gone. There was nothing there to see but he was looking anyway.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

"You ever think about dyin?"
"Yeah. Some. You?"
"Yeah. Some. You think there's a heaven?"
"Yeah. Dont you?"
"I dont know. Yeah. Maybe. You think you can believe in heaven if you dont believe in hell?"
"I guess you can believe what you want to."
"Rawlins nodded. You think about all the stuff that can happen to you," he said. "There aint no end to it."
"You fixin to get religion on us?"
"No. Just sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't be better off if I did."

He said that war had destroyed the country and that men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent's flesh for its bite.

"They have a long life, dreams. I have dreams now which I had as a young girl. They have an odd durability for something not quite real."
"Do you think they mean anything?"
She looked surprised. "Oh yes," she said. "Dont you?"
"Well. I dont know. They're in your head."
She smiled again. "I suppose I dont consider that to be the condemnation you do."

"There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot."

...no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.

...the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

"Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?"

Sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh, sweeter for the betrayal.

She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in a darkened wood. That burned cold. Like the moon that burned cold.

"I grew up in a world of men. I thought this would have prepared me to live in a world of men but it did not. I was also rebellious and so I recognize it in others. Yet I think that I had no wish to break things. Or perhaps only those things that wished to break me. The names of the entities that have power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed."

Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.

"Would it satisfy you," he said, "if I was to just go on and admit to bein a fourteen carat gold plated son of a bitch?"

There seemed insufficient substance to him to be the object of men's wrath. There seemed nothing about him sufficient to fuel any enterprise at all. 

The others are simply outside. They live in a world of possibility that has no end. Perhaps God can say what is to become of them. But I cannot. 

He said that when she returned he intended to speak to her with the greatest seriousness. He said that he intended to know her heart. 

I don't believe in signing on just till it quits suitin you. You either stick or you quit and I wouldnt quit you I dont care what you done. And that's about all I got to say.

You listen to me, he said. Dont you let em think they aint goin to have to. You hear me? I intend to make em kill me. I wont take nothin less. They either got to kill us or let us be. There aint no middle ground.

"Even in a place like this where we are concerned with fundamental things the mind of the anglo is closed in this rare way.

"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am."
"I don't think you're stupid. I just don't like you."

Evil is a true thing in Mexico. It goes about on its own legs. Maybe some day it will come to visit you. Maybe it already has.

"What do you want to know?" he said. 
"Only what the world wants to know.""What does the world want to know?"
"The world wants to know if you have cajones. If you are brave."

Take care with whom you break bread.

"Americans have ideas sometimes that are not so practical. They think that there are good things and bad things. They are very superstitious, you know."
"You don't think there's good things and bad things?"
"Things no. I think it is a superstition. It is the superstition of a godless people."
"You think Americans are godless?"
"Oh yes. Don't you?"

He looked deep into those dark eyes and there were deeps there to look into. A whole malign history burning cold and remote and black. 

All my life I had the feelin that trouble was close at hand. Not that I was about to get into it. Just that it was always there.

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness.

They were watching so that they could see if death were coming. Eyes that had seen it before and knew the colors it traveled under and what it looked like when it got there.

And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.

Those whom life does not cure death will. 

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

I've no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favor?

...scared money can't win and a worried man can't love.

"Are you no afraid of God?"
"I got no reason to be afraid of God. I've even got a bone or two to pick with him."

He thought that in the beauty of the world were his 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.