All The Pretty Horses

I grew up in a rural part of the country and didn't like it. And yet, reading Cormac always makes me want to put on double denim and a pair of boots and go horseback through the American Southwest as if I would enjoy that. Also strange given that none of the characters in Cormac's book have a particularly good time in the borderlands.

Here are some lines that stopped me in my tracks, either because I found them beautiful, relatable, or despairing (often all at once):

Blevins rolled down the leg of his overalls and poked at the fire with a stick. I told that son of a bitch I wouldnt take a whippin off him and I didnt.

...I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all oter betrayals came easily.

I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it. That the desire was the thing itself. The thing itself. I could think of nothing else of which that was true.

...the weight on his heart had begun to lift and he repeated what his father had once told him, that scared money cant win and a worried man cant love

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

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