You can’t be all Mexican. It’s like being all mongrel.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter XII

When the lambs is lost in the mountain ... They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter V

It makes no difference what men think of war.... War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter XVII

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter III

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter IV

When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter II

Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter XVII

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter II

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

--CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian, Chapter XXIII