The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun
sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud
before him.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady Cole, the evening of his grandfather's
funeral, rides out on his horse from the ranch home he has shared
with his grandfather, Chapter 1, Page 5. |
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood
and the heat of the blood that ran them.
All the Pretty Horses
Chapter 1, Page 7. |
They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pasture-land.
The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses
into a lope. The light fell away behind them. They rode out
on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and
the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard
somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased
where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the
earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried
their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that
they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty
and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric,
like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against
the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady Cole sets out for Mexico on
his horse Redbo, accompanied by best friend Lacey Rawlins on
his horse Junior, Chapter 1, Page 30. |
Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere
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 otherwisetening to the water drip in the woods.
Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late
world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in
the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again.
Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen
air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my
heart were stone.
All the Pretty Horses
Rawlins tells John Grady he believes God
looks out for people, Chapter 1, Page 92. |
Finally he said that among men there was no such communion
as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at
all was probably an illusion.
All the Pretty Horses
Luis, Chapter 2, Page 111. |
As he was drifting to sleep his thoughts were of horses and
of the open country and of horses. Horses still wild on the
mesa who'd never seen a man afoot and who knew nothing of him
or his life yet in whose souls he would come to reside forever.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady, Chapter 2, Page 117. |
But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that
were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth
to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth
proper to a man.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady and Antonio, Chapter 2, Page
127. |
Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.
All the Pretty Horses
Don Hector to John Grady, Chapter 2, Page
146. |
I cant back up and start over. But I dont see the point in
slobberin over it. And I cant see where it would make me feel
better to be able to point a finger at somebody else.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady, Chapter 3, Page 155. |
I cant back up and start over. The truth is what happened.
It aint what come out of somebody's mouth.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady, Chapter 3, Page 168. |
They all seemed to be waiting for something. Like passengers
in a halted train.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady and Rawlins and the captain
as they watch one another in the stonefloored room at the Mexican
prison in Saltillo, Chapter 3, Page 179. |
Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial
societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an
egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard
and that was his readiness to kill.
All the Pretty Horses
The prison in Saltillo, Chapter 3, Page
182. |
Perez smiled. You are free to go, he said, I can
see you dont believe what I tell you. It is the same with money.
Americans have this problem always I believe. They talk about
tainted money. But money doesnt have this special quality. And
the Mexican would never think to make things special or to put
them in a special place where money is no use. Why do this?
If money is good money is good. He doesnt have bad money. He
doesnt have this problem. This abnormal thought.
John Grady leaned and stubbed out the cigarette in the tin ash
tray on the table. Cigarettes in that world were money themselves
and the one he left broken and smoldering in front of his host
had hardly been smoked at all. I'll tell you what, he said.
Tell me.
I'll see you around.
All the Pretty Horses
A persistently defiant John Grady refuses
to deal with political exile Perez who has suggested that freedom
from the Saltillo prison can be gained by payment of a bribe
to him, Chapter 3, Page 195. |
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.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady on simple kindness of Mexican
farmworkers, Chapter 4, Page 219. |
By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had
become a freethinker.
All the Pretty Horses
Alfonsa, Alejandra's grandaunt, to John
Grady, Chapter 4, Page 232. |
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.
All the Pretty Horses
Alfonsa to John Grady, recounting words
of revoltionary leader she fell in love with in her youth but
was prevented from marrying by her disapproving family. It was
Alfonsa paid bribe to get John Grady out of prison and made
Alejandra swear never to see him again.
Chapter 4, Page 235. |
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 other betrayals came easily.
All the Pretty Horses
Alfonsa to John Grady, Chapter 4, Page
235. |
|
Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
All the Pretty Horses
Alfonsa, Alejandra's grandaunt, to John
Grady, Chapter 4, Page 238.
|
There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over
the might have been, but there is no might have been. There
never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know
history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can
save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness
and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who
knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change.
All the Pretty Horses
Alfonsa to John Grady, Chapter 4, Page
239. |
In his new boots and shirt he began to feel better than he'd
felt in a long time and the weight on his heart had begun to
life and he repeated what his father had once told him, that
scared money cant win and a worried man cant love.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady, Chapter 4, Page 247. |
She came from the shower wrapped in a towel and she sat on
the bed and took his hand and looked down at him. I cannot do
what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot.
He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment
and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and
soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it
smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would
ever leave.
All the Pretty Horses
A devastated John Grady after Alejandra
tell him she cannot bring herself to go with him to America,
Chapter 4, Page 254. |
He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope
and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars
trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the
edge of the world as he lay there the agony in his heart was
like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some
formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls
wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable
to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless
and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what
he feared was that there might be no limits.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady after his rejection by Alejandra,
Chapter 4, Page 256. |
Captain, he said. You just fired a shot for the common man.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady sets out to retrieve his horse,
taking the captain hostage and using the captain's pistol to
gauge the distance of his enemies, Chapter 4, Page 271. |
He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in
the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand
and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not
known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world
although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of
the world were hid 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.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady riding through Mexican countryside,
Chapter 4, Page 282. |
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.
All the Pretty Horses
Cafe proprieter to John Grady in Mexican
village as they watch preparations in the square for a wedding,
Chapter 4, Page 284. |
Where is your country? he said.
I dont know, said John Grady. I dont know where it is. I dont
know what happens to country.
All the Pretty Horses
Rawlins and John Grady, Chapter 4, Page
299. |
And for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself
or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow
the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for
the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or
she.
All the Pretty Horses
John Grady, at the funeral of his nursemaid
Abuela, the last connection with the old way of life at the
ranch, Chapter 4, Page 301. |
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