No Country for Old Men

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This is the fourth Cormac McCarthy novel I’ve read. It’s amazing how he writes beautiful prose that describes such violent, disturbing things. Chigurh is such a strange, terrifying villain. I think I’d recommend this as a first book for someone just getting into them. Below are my highlights of passages that stuck out to me.

Chapter I

What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? pp. 3–4

The rocks there were etched with pictographs perhaps a thousand years old. The men who drew them hunters like himself. Of them there was no other trace. p. 11

His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel. p. 18

Chapter II

Here the other day they was a woman put her baby in a trash compactor. Who would think of such a thing? My wife wont read the papers no more. She’s probably right. She generally is. p. 40

He stood there looking out across the desert. So quiet. Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. p. 45

Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it? p. 57

Chapter III

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it. p. 64

I dont know. I used to say they were the same ones we’ve always had to deal with. Same ones my grandaddy had to deal with. Back then they was rustlin cattle. Now they’re runnin dope. But I dont know as that’s true no more. I’m like you. I aint sure we’ve seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they’d have to build a annex on to hell. p. 79

By the time he got up he knew that he was probably going to have to kill somebody. He just didnt know who it was. p. 87

Chapter IV

Jack used to say that bein sheriff was one of the best jobs you could have and bein a ex-sheriff one of the worst. Maybe lots of things is like that. p. 90

People think they know what they want but they generally dont. Sometimes if they’re lucky they’ll get it anyways. p. 91

It had already occurred to him that he would probably never be safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to. And if you did? p.109

He dropped to his stomach and put his ear to the space under the door. A cool wind. As if a door had opened somewhere. What have you done. What have you failed to do. p.110

Chapter V

He sipped his coffee. The face that lapped and shifted in the dark liquid in the cup seemed an omen of things to come. Things losing shape. Taking you with them. p. 127

Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change. I’d have to say he’d be the first. p. 128

I’ll tell you somethin, Sheriff. Nineteen is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away.pp. 133–134

Because he’s not somebody you really want to know. The people he meets tend to have very short futures. Nonexistent, in fact. p. 150

You cant make a deal with him. Let me say it again. Even if you gave him the money he’d still kill you. There’s no one alive on this planet that’s ever had even a cross word with him. They’re all dead. These are not good odds. He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that. p. 153

Chapter VI

Young people anymore they seem to have a hard time growin up. I dont know why. Maybe it’s just that you dont grow up any faster than what you have to. p. 158

Getting hurt changed me, he said. Changed my perspective. I’ve moved on, in a way. Some things have fallen into place that were not there before. I thought they were, but they werent. The best way I can put it is that I’ve sort of caught up with myself. That’s not a bad thing. It was overdue. p. 173

If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule? p. 175

It’s not the same, Chigurh said. You’ve been giving up things for years to get here. I dont think I even understood that. How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? pp. 177–178

Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing. Chigurh rose and picked up the empty casing off the rug and blew into it and put it in his pocket and looked at his watch. The new day was still a minute away. p. 178

You bring me the money and I’ll let her walk. Otherwise she’s accountable. The same as you. I dont know if you care about that. But that’s the best deal you’re going to get. I wont tell you you can save yourself because you cant. p. 184

Sometimes you have a little problem and you dont fix it and then all of a sudden it aint a little problem anymore. You understand what I’m tellin you? p. 189

Chapter VII

I wont talk about the war neither. I was supposed to be a war hero and I lost a whole squad of men. Got decorated for it. They died and I got a medal. I dont even need to know what you think about that. There aint a day I dont remember it. p. 195

After he left Moss walked out onto the prairie behind the motel with one of the motel pillows under his arm and he wrapped the pillow about the muzzle of the gun and fired off three rounds and then stood there in the cold sunlight watching the feathers drift across the gray chaparral, thinking about his life, what was past and what was to come. p. 210

Then he just stood there paying the brim of his hat slowly through his fingers. The posture of a man perhaps who has just buried something. I dont know a damn thing, he said. p. 213

Chapter VIII

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. Maybe he did. p. 218

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission. p. 220

The point is there aint no point. p. 227

It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. p. 227

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there? p. 227

Chapter IX

My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. p. 249

I have no enemies. I dont permit such a thing. p. 253

I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning. p. 259

You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people dont believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world. Do you see? p. 259

I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it. p. 265

Chapter X

You care about people you try and lighten their load for em. Even when it’s self-ordained. p. 281

I think sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all. p. 282

I thought if I lived my life in the strictest way I knew how then I would not ever again have a thing that would eat on me thataway. I said that I was twenty-one years old and I was entitled to one mistake, particularly if I could learn from it and become the sort of man I had it in my mind to be. Well, I was wrong about all of that. p. 282

You dont know where things will take you, do you? p. 292

Chapter XI

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you’re just too close to it. It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is somethin I dont want to be wrong about. p. 295

[…] when you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon somethin that you may very well not be equal to and I think that this is one of them things. When you’ve said that it’s real and not just in your head I’m not all that sure what it is you have said. p. 299

Chapter XII

I think I know where we’re headed. We’re bein bought with our own money. And it aint just the drugs. There is fortunes bein accumulated out there that they dont nobody even know about. What do we think is goin to come of that money? Money that can buy whole countries. It done has.p. 303

It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight. p. 304

Chapter XIII

But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. p. 307

And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. p. 309