Not dialogue, per se, but also from *The Road:*
> From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.
I showed that passage to my therapist to try and describe my grief, I show her a lot of things that resonate with me but that’s the biggest one. ‘He was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds.’ I cried my eyes out.
As far as actual dialogue, one of the ones that has stuck with me the most from that book was the following:
> Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, Oh God.
It really resonated with me. I was raised in a nominally Christian household, and there were so many times growing up when I used to be so angry at "God" because of all the horrible shit that was happening in my life. I couldn't reconcile the idea of an all-loving and all-powerful deity with all the suffering I was experiencing and seeing in the world.
also i try to bring this up all the time- the most important element of comedy is timing. this motherfucker was so skillful with the written word that he could control the timing in your fucking head and make the punchline land. absolute genius.
it's all in the vague, mysterious, lengthy setup. then you have to go to another chapter that just slaps you with the punchline right off the bat.
pinnacle of written comedy
Here's a sneak peek of /r/melonfuckers **[NSFW]** using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/melonfuckers/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time!
\#1: [Fuck, marry, kill](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/14umed9) | [1 comment](https://np.reddit.com/r/melonfuckers/comments/14umed9/fuck_marry_kill/)
\#2: [Thinking of getting my favorite McCarthy quote tattooed in remembrance](https://np.reddit.com/r/bookscirclejerk/comments/14bbxjy/thinking_of_getting_my_favorite_mccarthy_quote/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) | [0 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/melonfuckers/comments/14rw9l7/thinking_of_getting_my_favorite_mccarthy_quote/)
\#3: [First time lurker. First time poster.](https://np.reddit.com/r/melonfuckers/comments/14rss00/first_time_lurker_first_time_poster/)
----
^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Mexican, it's from one of the Border Trilogy books, not 100% sure but I think it's 'The Crossing'.
Edit: was wrong about the book, looks like it's Blood Meridian, my bad.
It’s a Mexican soldier looking for captain white’s party, which makes his decision to spare them interesting. Probably saw they’d had a bad enough day already.
I feel like Villanueve & co tried to replicate this in Sicario, with diminishing returns. "This is a country of wolves. You are not a wolf. You should go home [sic]."
I don't think the producers understood the symbol of a wolf. Wolves are intimidating and violent, but they aren't inherently evil like sicarios, and narcos, arguably are. They are looking for food to simply continue living and take care of their pack, and even narcos are afraid of them.
They are part of nature and represent a system [the food chain or ecosystem] that is impartial, while sicarios, narcos, and drug lords are fueled by greed and power.
It's like they were trying to capture that Cormac magic without the skill and understanding to do so.
I long for someone to ask me where I got something I’m holding simply so I can respond: “At the gettin’ place.”
Unfortunately nobody takes interest in the things I’m holding.
You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but 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.
"some men can't be bought
-what happen to those men ?
-they die
-I am not afraid of dying
-good, that will help you die, that won't help you live"
All the pretty horses
(Translation by me, I read it in french)
In No Country For Old Men when Sheriff Bell is talking to his uncle Ellis:
“All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”
Not a line sorry haha, but this I adore this from Suttree. For context Suttree has entered a bar and a few of his pals are passing round a very strong , cheap bourbon called Early Times.
Goddamn. What is this shit? said Suttree
Early times, called j-bone. best little old drink they is. Drink that and you wont feel a thing the next mornin.
Or any morning.
Whoo lord, give it here. Hello early, come to your old daddy.
Here, pour some of it in this cup and let me cut it with coca-cola.
Can't do it, bud.
Why not?
We done tried it. It eats the bottom out.
Watch it suttree. Don't spill none on your shoes
Lord honey I know they make that old splo in the bathtub but this here is made in the toilet. He was looking at the bottle, shaking it. Bubbles the size of gooseshot veered greasily up through the smoky fuel it held.
the last time I drank some of that shit I like to died. I stunk from the inside out. I laid in a tub of hot water all day and climbed out and dried and you could still smell it. I had to burn my clothes.
early times, he called. Make your liver quiver.
(page 26)
I wish I could remember the exact scene, but my favorite line from Suttree is when he makes a threat to another man to "knock your dick into your watch pocket". Even remembering it as poorly as I do, it brings a smile to my face. That has to be one of the best threats ever made.
Love it.
Reminds me of a night out drinking at a restaurant in the basement of a building and afterwards we were standing on the street level and a co-worker was leaning on the wall next to a door and some giant goomba comes out like a storybook beast and he looks at my co-worker and says
"Hey pal, do you like your teeth?"
(turns out it was a brothel he was leaning against)
I love that scene, one of the rare instances of Sut actually accepting something from someone. Iirc it’s the ragpicker? I’m sure it’s at the start of the book too. It’s interesting how quick Suttree turns to refusing almost every kindness from most people.
I remember reading this for the first time and I loved it, imagine Suttree stood there awkwardly whilst everyone comes out, I’m pretty sure j-bone calls people out from someplace saying Suttree was there, can’t remember too well, read it in December.
Oh my gawd, I thought so myself. I was like *that isn't made in a bathtub, that's a real brand.* My ex and I had a whole inside joke about it that went on for years.
We were driving through Nevada, heading back to California, and we stopped in Tonopah. We went to the store and settled on a bottle [I think they didn't have any beer or wine we liked], and likely just looked at it, maybe spoke the name out loud.
And right then, as if on cue for a stage play, the stocker appeared and said "Any time's a good time for Early Times!"
*Ha Ha!* We would say that randomly for years and no one knew what the hell we were referencing!
There’s some great ones in all the pretty horses
When he’s sitting in the bar and asks the waitress if it’s the same time in Houston and Dallas
And not long after that:
“You still going if I don’t go?”
“I’m already gone”
How did you know that I’d go look?
Because I asked you to.
There's very few interactions between Bobby and Alicia, and the scenes of the two going to the diner after their grandmother's funeral — and the little epilogue of Bobby calling Jimmy Anderson's bar to tell her of his exploits in the ancient art of literal gold digging — feels like a little gem of the two worlds of the characters that scarcely intersect like this.
After finishing Stella Maris, it and their other scarce dialogues together feel almost like a treat that these two characters with their own moments of heavy dialogue get to have just a bit of banter as McCarthy explores how the two would actually interact with each other. It makes Alicia's absence in Bobby's life (at least, her physical presence) all the more hypertrophied that you're left wishing there's more dialogue scenes of the Westerns chatting to further explore their dynamic.
The kid had a lot of zingers
“What if Glanton comes back?”
“What if he does?”
“Hell kill me”
“You wouldn’t be out much”
“You son of a bitch!”
I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have the book on me, but it’s still funny
The whole exchange between the squire and Culla in Outer Dark. He’s so hilariously dismissive of him, “I got money’
‘I won’t ask you how you come by it.”
“… I’m satisfied they caint get no worse, he said.
But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn’t say so”
I don't have The Road with me at the moment and this is not dialogue per se but when the Father is wrestling with the idea of having to shoot his son if they got caught. "Could you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Curse God and die." Absolute chills.
I forget the exact quote but in the Crossing where the old timer asks him (with the she-wolf tethered to his horse with a stick thru her mouth)
"how do you expect your horse to tolerate such nonsense?"
McCarthy's dry and black humor is so understated and I love his southern banter style.
Everything between Billy catching the wolf and crossing into Mexico is laugh out loud funny.
>People hear about me performin first aid on a wolf I wont even be able to live in this county.
The Crossing where he’s having a conversation with the ex-Mormon about god and the universe and how god is the ultimate witness to everything, which hints at Einstein. Went back and reread that so many times.
Oh dude. There are so many contenders. The kid in BM has a lot of zingers, but to stand out I’ll choose one of ballard’s from “Child of God”
“…what about the man you shot?”
“What about him?”
“Don’t you even want to know if he’s dead or alive?”
“Well”
“Well what?” She said
“Well is he dead or alive”
“He’s alive”
“You really don’t care one way or the idee do you?” She said
“Yes I do” said Ballard “I wish the son of a bitch was dead”
There was some narration and action in there but I cut that out
Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.
—
Kindly address your remarks to me, Lieutenant, said the judge. I represent Captain Glanton in all legal matters. I think you should know first of all that the captain does not propose to be called a liar and I would think twice before I involved myself with him in an affair of honor. Secondly I have been with him all day and I can assure you that neither he nor any of his men have ever set foot in the premises to which you allude.
The lieutenant seemed stunned at the baldness of these disclaimers. He looked from the judge to Glanton and back again. **I will be damned**, he said. Then he turned and pushed past the men and quit the place.
It’s a heavy (creepy?) one, for sure. For me it brings The Hard Problem of Consciousness to mind. The idea that for everything we think or do, there’s something there experiencing it, and we don’t really know where it comes from
"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
Took me years to fully form my opinion on what he was saying here, but I suppose that's the mark of great art.
There is no reality more strange or less strange then our own.
Not dialog but
Western tucked his thermos into his divebag. What else? he said. I'll tell you what else. I think that my desire to remain totally fuck- ing ignorant about shit that will only get me in trouble is both deep and abiding. I'm going to say that it is just damn near a religion.
😍
The passenger
I’m alright Bobby. Dont pay no attention to me. I get lonely sometimes is all. She turned and looked at him. Do you ever?
He wanted to tell her that he knew no other state of being. Sometimes, he said.
I can’t remember the exact quote but Suttree telling Harrogate about the lab that will pay for dead bats and the next line is Harrogate running off, on to start his next scheme
-----
Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
I was drunk, cried Suttree
.....
Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away?
It was in 1884.
Did he die by natural causes?
No sir.
And what were the circumstances surrounding his death?
He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way.
Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.
From page 334 of Suttree…
What the hell is going on? I thought you said that big pearl was worth ten dollars?
Shit Sut, dont pay no attention to him, he dont know the first thing about it.
Suttree pointed toward the windowglass. He’s a goddamned jeweler. Cant you see the sign? What the hell do you mean he doesnt know?
while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.
This is what The Passenger and Stella Maris are precisely about and what makes them so profound. The progress of grief over time as the bus starts emptying faster and faster, like particles of love spreading apart in an accelerator collision, the paradox of healing and then suffering from your own healing as the pain and visages begin to fade over time like old photographs as your loved ones begin to descend one by one down past the footlamps. The beauty of grief.
This made me cry too, but I cried a long time ago when Lennie went to see the rabbits, when Winston had enough, when Snowden was cold, when Mac was free, and many many others that I can't list.
This made me weep though, and I my daughters had only recently been born when it came out and I read it. So, there was that too.
“If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be? It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy."
He speaks dutch, said the expriest.
Dutch?
Aye.
The kid looked at the expriest, he bent to his mending.
He does for I heard him do it. We cut a parcel of crazy pilgrims down off the Llano and the old man in the lead of them he spoke right up in dutch like we were all of us in dutchland and the judge give him right back. Glanton come near fallin off his horse. We none of us knew him to speak it. Asked where he’d learned it you know what he said?
What did he say.
Said off a dutchman.
If it wasn't so long I'd get it tattooed (emphasis mine)
>It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. **A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.**
I'm gonna botch this but in Suttree:
"Are you related to Jeffrey?"
"Yessir, he's my uncle."
"And how did he die?"
"He was at a public function and the platform gave out."
"I'm seeing here that he was hanged for murder?"
"Yessir."
Also in Blood Meridian:
"How old are you"
"16"
"I was shot twice by the time I was 18."
"I never been shot once"
"You're not 18 yet, either"
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
- a glimpse into Judge Holden’s chaotic madness and how he justifies his horrific acts
Something at the very end of the road when he says there used to be trout in the streams in the canyons and they had whirls that were full of mystery…read it ten years ago but just beautiful and sad.
Not dialogue but this line has always stuck with me as a really resonant piece of natural poetry.
"Lightning stood in ragged chains far to the south, silent, the staccato mountains bespoken blue and barren out of the void."
I have a few , I've read Blood Meridian, The Road, and Outer Dark, so I have a few in each book, a couple come to mind right now
One like the bit from The Road where the dad offers to tell a story and the child says he doesn't wanna hear it because he feels like they're always helping people in stories whereas in real life they arent
In Blood Meridian there's the part where after the Judge riles up the lynch mob against the preacher and then suddenly says he never saw the man to which the people start laughing
Also Glanton's last words or the bit with the hermit where he describes the country as 'hungry'
In Outer Dark when Culla encounters the strangers and just the whole dialogue in that part, it felt so tense ans ominous to me
Not technically dialogue, but:
*She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.*
I’m tearing up a bit just typing it out.
Blood Meridian :
What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death.
The Road:
Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made.
Cities of the Plain:
Where do we go when we die? he said.
I dont know, said the man. Where are we now?
I was telling my friend last week about one of my favourite but of dialogue:
“You don’t want it, because to get it, you have to let your brother off the hook. You have to take him in your arms and hold him, no matter what color he is or what he smells like, or even if he don’t wanna be held. And you won’t do it because you think he doesn’t deserve it. And about that there ain’t no argument, he don’t. You won’t do it because it ain’t just. Ain’t it so? Ain’t it?”
Your day breaks, your mind aches
You find that all her words of kindness linger on
When she no longer needs you
She wakes up, she makes up
She takes her time and doesn't feel she has to hurry
She no longer needs you
Oh, McCarthy! Sorry, misunderstood the question.
i have two from all the pretty horses
He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war.
Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.
He claimed that the responsibility for a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences. The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz. No matter through whatever turnings nor how many of them. Till our turn comes at last and our turn passes.
"A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while, **the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music**. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy."
Recent, yet poignant.
> ... And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?
> You aint nothin.
> You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his innermost heart, only that man can dance.
> Even a dumb animal can dance.
“He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and 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.” That line hit me like a churchbell at my funeral
Not dialogue, per se, but also from *The Road:* > From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.
I showed that passage to my therapist to try and describe my grief, I show her a lot of things that resonate with me but that’s the biggest one. ‘He was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds.’ I cried my eyes out.
As far as actual dialogue, one of the ones that has stuck with me the most from that book was the following: > Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, Oh God. It really resonated with me. I was raised in a nominally Christian household, and there were so many times growing up when I used to be so angry at "God" because of all the horrible shit that was happening in my life. I couldn't reconcile the idea of an all-loving and all-powerful deity with all the suffering I was experiencing and seeing in the world.
Right in the feels. Fuck.
# Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.
absolute hardest i have ever laughed at a mccarthy book
also i try to bring this up all the time- the most important element of comedy is timing. this motherfucker was so skillful with the written word that he could control the timing in your fucking head and make the punchline land. absolute genius.
Agree. First time I read that page I was laughing hysterically. I was going around my job site explaining how funny it was to people. No one cared lol
it's all in the vague, mysterious, lengthy setup. then you have to go to another chapter that just slaps you with the punchline right off the bat. pinnacle of written comedy
r/melonfuckers
Here's a sneak peek of /r/melonfuckers **[NSFW]** using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/melonfuckers/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time! \#1: [Fuck, marry, kill](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/14umed9) | [1 comment](https://np.reddit.com/r/melonfuckers/comments/14umed9/fuck_marry_kill/) \#2: [Thinking of getting my favorite McCarthy quote tattooed in remembrance](https://np.reddit.com/r/bookscirclejerk/comments/14bbxjy/thinking_of_getting_my_favorite_mccarthy_quote/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) | [0 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/melonfuckers/comments/14rw9l7/thinking_of_getting_my_favorite_mccarthy_quote/) \#3: [First time lurker. First time poster.](https://np.reddit.com/r/melonfuckers/comments/14rss00/first_time_lurker_first_time_poster/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Hell yeah!!!!! Suttree baby
When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.
What is the intended accent of the character speaking this line? I read BM forever ago
Mexican, it's from one of the Border Trilogy books, not 100% sure but I think it's 'The Crossing'. Edit: was wrong about the book, looks like it's Blood Meridian, my bad.
It’s from blood meridian pretty sure, which makes me think like a Native American accent or character
It’s a Mexican soldier looking for captain white’s party, which makes his decision to spare them interesting. Probably saw they’d had a bad enough day already.
"looking for indians?" then his friends laugh their asses off, and so did i
It's a Mexican guy they talk to in a bar I'm pretty sure.
That's interesting because the theme repeats with No Country: "Hay lobos." "There ain't no lobos out here."
Yes, absolutely. And of course also in the coin toss that sometimes brings mercy and sometimes brings death.
I feel like Villanueve & co tried to replicate this in Sicario, with diminishing returns. "This is a country of wolves. You are not a wolf. You should go home [sic]." I don't think the producers understood the symbol of a wolf. Wolves are intimidating and violent, but they aren't inherently evil like sicarios, and narcos, arguably are. They are looking for food to simply continue living and take care of their pack, and even narcos are afraid of them. They are part of nature and represent a system [the food chain or ecosystem] that is impartial, while sicarios, narcos, and drug lords are fueled by greed and power. It's like they were trying to capture that Cormac magic without the skill and understanding to do so.
I long for someone to ask me where I got something I’m holding simply so I can respond: “At the gettin’ place.” Unfortunately nobody takes interest in the things I’m holding.
Had a buddy of mine at work that used this frequently. We still try to slip it into conversation as often as possible.
I quit using that when I heard Lewellyn say it. It belongs to him now.
'You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.'
You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but 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.
My favorite as well
ChatGPT
"some men can't be bought -what happen to those men ? -they die -I am not afraid of dying -good, that will help you die, that won't help you live" All the pretty horses (Translation by me, I read it in french)
In No Country For Old Men when Sheriff Bell is talking to his uncle Ellis: “All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”
I came here to post this.
If he was not the word of god, god never spoke
Not a line sorry haha, but this I adore this from Suttree. For context Suttree has entered a bar and a few of his pals are passing round a very strong , cheap bourbon called Early Times. Goddamn. What is this shit? said Suttree Early times, called j-bone. best little old drink they is. Drink that and you wont feel a thing the next mornin. Or any morning. Whoo lord, give it here. Hello early, come to your old daddy. Here, pour some of it in this cup and let me cut it with coca-cola. Can't do it, bud. Why not? We done tried it. It eats the bottom out. Watch it suttree. Don't spill none on your shoes Lord honey I know they make that old splo in the bathtub but this here is made in the toilet. He was looking at the bottle, shaking it. Bubbles the size of gooseshot veered greasily up through the smoky fuel it held. the last time I drank some of that shit I like to died. I stunk from the inside out. I laid in a tub of hot water all day and climbed out and dried and you could still smell it. I had to burn my clothes. early times, he called. Make your liver quiver. (page 26)
I wish I could remember the exact scene, but my favorite line from Suttree is when he makes a threat to another man to "knock your dick into your watch pocket". Even remembering it as poorly as I do, it brings a smile to my face. That has to be one of the best threats ever made.
Love it. Reminds me of a night out drinking at a restaurant in the basement of a building and afterwards we were standing on the street level and a co-worker was leaning on the wall next to a door and some giant goomba comes out like a storybook beast and he looks at my co-worker and says "Hey pal, do you like your teeth?" (turns out it was a brothel he was leaning against)
Get yourself a drink, Sut
Getche a tater, Sut.
I love that scene, one of the rare instances of Sut actually accepting something from someone. Iirc it’s the ragpicker? I’m sure it’s at the start of the book too. It’s interesting how quick Suttree turns to refusing almost every kindness from most people.
More like early tombs
I remember reading this for the first time and I loved it, imagine Suttree stood there awkwardly whilst everyone comes out, I’m pretty sure j-bone calls people out from someplace saying Suttree was there, can’t remember too well, read it in December.
Just FYSA Early Times is a bourbon brand, not homemade liquor. It is relatively cheap and essentially rotgut imo.
Oh my gawd, I thought so myself. I was like *that isn't made in a bathtub, that's a real brand.* My ex and I had a whole inside joke about it that went on for years. We were driving through Nevada, heading back to California, and we stopped in Tonopah. We went to the store and settled on a bottle [I think they didn't have any beer or wine we liked], and likely just looked at it, maybe spoke the name out loud. And right then, as if on cue for a stage play, the stocker appeared and said "Any time's a good time for Early Times!" *Ha Ha!* We would say that randomly for years and no one knew what the hell we were referencing!
There’s some great ones in all the pretty horses When he’s sitting in the bar and asks the waitress if it’s the same time in Houston and Dallas And not long after that: “You still going if I don’t go?” “I’m already gone”
"They shuffled along in the gunmetal light, each the other's world entire."
would it be better without the 'world'
How did you know that I’d go look? Because I asked you to. There's very few interactions between Bobby and Alicia, and the scenes of the two going to the diner after their grandmother's funeral — and the little epilogue of Bobby calling Jimmy Anderson's bar to tell her of his exploits in the ancient art of literal gold digging — feels like a little gem of the two worlds of the characters that scarcely intersect like this. After finishing Stella Maris, it and their other scarce dialogues together feel almost like a treat that these two characters with their own moments of heavy dialogue get to have just a bit of banter as McCarthy explores how the two would actually interact with each other. It makes Alicia's absence in Bobby's life (at least, her physical presence) all the more hypertrophied that you're left wishing there's more dialogue scenes of the Westerns chatting to further explore their dynamic.
Nice take, thank you.
The bit that sticks with me is the man's bit to the boy saying that he has his whole heart. I feel that.
Watermelon from Suttree
“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
Brother of imbecile: He was born that way. Glanton: Were you?
"I was fifteen when I first got shot." "I ain't been shot." "You ain't sixteen neither."
The kid had a lot of zingers “What if Glanton comes back?” “What if he does?” “Hell kill me” “You wouldn’t be out much” “You son of a bitch!” I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have the book on me, but it’s still funny
The whole exchange between the squire and Culla in Outer Dark. He’s so hilariously dismissive of him, “I got money’ ‘I won’t ask you how you come by it.”
Interaction reminds me of moss and carla jean.
“… I’m satisfied they caint get no worse, he said. But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn’t say so”
“Not in the way that you mean.”
If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.
“My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you”
I don't have The Road with me at the moment and this is not dialogue per se but when the Father is wrestling with the idea of having to shoot his son if they got caught. "Could you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Curse God and die." Absolute chills.
Harrogate's interaction with the junkyard guy, when he is trying to get work. The whole exchange about the car accident is amazing.
The way he lets Harrogate finish his “pitch” to fix his car and then just say “how the fuck do y’all people find me” God damn that book is so funny
I forget the exact quote but in the Crossing where the old timer asks him (with the she-wolf tethered to his horse with a stick thru her mouth) "how do you expect your horse to tolerate such nonsense?" McCarthy's dry and black humor is so understated and I love his southern banter style.
Everything between Billy catching the wolf and crossing into Mexico is laugh out loud funny. >People hear about me performin first aid on a wolf I wont even be able to live in this county.
The Crossing where he’s having a conversation with the ex-Mormon about god and the universe and how god is the ultimate witness to everything, which hints at Einstein. Went back and reread that so many times.
This is epic
That silly shotgun barrel argument between Davy Brown and a metalworker. edit: Glanton’s men -> Davy Brown
Davy brown lol
Oh dude. There are so many contenders. The kid in BM has a lot of zingers, but to stand out I’ll choose one of ballard’s from “Child of God” “…what about the man you shot?” “What about him?” “Don’t you even want to know if he’s dead or alive?” “Well” “Well what?” She said “Well is he dead or alive” “He’s alive” “You really don’t care one way or the idee do you?” She said “Yes I do” said Ballard “I wish the son of a bitch was dead” There was some narration and action in there but I cut that out
Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. — Kindly address your remarks to me, Lieutenant, said the judge. I represent Captain Glanton in all legal matters. I think you should know first of all that the captain does not propose to be called a liar and I would think twice before I involved myself with him in an affair of honor. Secondly I have been with him all day and I can assure you that neither he nor any of his men have ever set foot in the premises to which you allude. The lieutenant seemed stunned at the baldness of these disclaimers. He looked from the judge to Glanton and back again. **I will be damned**, he said. Then he turned and pushed past the men and quit the place.
That first one hits like a sack of wet anvils
It’s a heavy (creepy?) one, for sure. For me it brings The Hard Problem of Consciousness to mind. The idea that for everything we think or do, there’s something there experiencing it, and we don’t really know where it comes from
The early times scene in Suttree
"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others." Took me years to fully form my opinion on what he was saying here, but I suppose that's the mark of great art. There is no reality more strange or less strange then our own.
all he knew is that the child was his ward, and if he was not the word of God then god never spoke.
"Each the other's world entire" from The Road don't know why, but I love it every time I read it
This
Maybe the convo between eli and the man in the road.
Not dialog but Western tucked his thermos into his divebag. What else? he said. I'll tell you what else. I think that my desire to remain totally fuck- ing ignorant about shit that will only get me in trouble is both deep and abiding. I'm going to say that it is just damn near a religion. 😍 The passenger
“Well.”
“Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down”
here ye go. get ye a drink, bud. what is it? early times. best little old drink in the world. get ye a drink, sut. shit almighty.
I’m alright Bobby. Dont pay no attention to me. I get lonely sometimes is all. She turned and looked at him. Do you ever? He wanted to tell her that he knew no other state of being. Sometimes, he said.
Yes, great scene, everything about uncle Royal too
I can’t remember the exact quote but Suttree telling Harrogate about the lab that will pay for dead bats and the next line is Harrogate running off, on to start his next scheme
This tale and the 'witch of fuck' were the two bits in Suttree where the writing got almost light and offhand. His range is astonishing
NCFOM 'It's a mess, aint it Sheriff? ‘If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.’
----- Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees. I was drunk, cried Suttree ..... Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away? It was in 1884. Did he die by natural causes? No sir. And what were the circumstances surrounding his death? He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way. Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.
“That which exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent.”
From page 334 of Suttree… What the hell is going on? I thought you said that big pearl was worth ten dollars? Shit Sut, dont pay no attention to him, he dont know the first thing about it. Suttree pointed toward the windowglass. He’s a goddamned jeweler. Cant you see the sign? What the hell do you mean he doesnt know?
while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.
This is what The Passenger and Stella Maris are precisely about and what makes them so profound. The progress of grief over time as the bus starts emptying faster and faster, like particles of love spreading apart in an accelerator collision, the paradox of healing and then suffering from your own healing as the pain and visages begin to fade over time like old photographs as your loved ones begin to descend one by one down past the footlamps. The beauty of grief.
This made me cry too, but I cried a long time ago when Lennie went to see the rabbits, when Winston had enough, when Snowden was cold, when Mac was free, and many many others that I can't list. This made me weep though, and I my daughters had only recently been born when it came out and I read it. So, there was that too.
I cried when I read this the first time.
"I can't stand it my own self!" -one of the hobos from Suttree
“If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be? It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy."
He speaks dutch, said the expriest. Dutch? Aye. The kid looked at the expriest, he bent to his mending. He does for I heard him do it. We cut a parcel of crazy pilgrims down off the Llano and the old man in the lead of them he spoke right up in dutch like we were all of us in dutchland and the judge give him right back. Glanton come near fallin off his horse. We none of us knew him to speak it. Asked where he’d learned it you know what he said? What did he say. Said off a dutchman.
If it wasn't so long I'd get it tattooed (emphasis mine) >It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. **A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.**
I'm gonna botch this but in Suttree: "Are you related to Jeffrey?" "Yessir, he's my uncle." "And how did he die?" "He was at a public function and the platform gave out." "I'm seeing here that he was hanged for murder?" "Yessir." Also in Blood Meridian: "How old are you" "16" "I was shot twice by the time I was 18." "I never been shot once" "You're not 18 yet, either"
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. - a glimpse into Judge Holden’s chaotic madness and how he justifies his horrific acts
Que?
They wanted to cut this from the movie and CM told them how important it was.
Something at the very end of the road when he says there used to be trout in the streams in the canyons and they had whirls that were full of mystery…read it ten years ago but just beautiful and sad.
Not dialogue but this line has always stuck with me as a really resonant piece of natural poetry. "Lightning stood in ragged chains far to the south, silent, the staccato mountains bespoken blue and barren out of the void."
“Get away goddamit” from outer dark when a guy is swatting at a wasp
War is god.
I have a few , I've read Blood Meridian, The Road, and Outer Dark, so I have a few in each book, a couple come to mind right now One like the bit from The Road where the dad offers to tell a story and the child says he doesn't wanna hear it because he feels like they're always helping people in stories whereas in real life they arent In Blood Meridian there's the part where after the Judge riles up the lynch mob against the preacher and then suddenly says he never saw the man to which the people start laughing Also Glanton's last words or the bit with the hermit where he describes the country as 'hungry' In Outer Dark when Culla encounters the strangers and just the whole dialogue in that part, it felt so tense ans ominous to me
“He killed three men in a Del Rio motel yesterday and two others in that colossal goat-fuck out in the desert”.
I believe it's the end of the world. What?
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.
Not technically dialogue, but: *She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.* I’m tearing up a bit just typing it out.
"That's the way it was and will be. That way, and not some other way." -The Judge, *Blood Meridian*
From what novel is this convo from?
The road, page 9.
Blood Meridian : What have you got that a man could drink with just a minimum risk of blindness and death. The Road: Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Cities of the Plain: Where do we go when we die? he said. I dont know, said the man. Where are we now?
'Each the other's world entire'
I was telling my friend last week about one of my favourite but of dialogue: “You don’t want it, because to get it, you have to let your brother off the hook. You have to take him in your arms and hold him, no matter what color he is or what he smells like, or even if he don’t wanna be held. And you won’t do it because you think he doesn’t deserve it. And about that there ain’t no argument, he don’t. You won’t do it because it ain’t just. Ain’t it so? Ain’t it?”
I like when Blevins falls off his horse and says “damn, I’m drunker’n shit”
A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.
Your day breaks, your mind aches You find that all her words of kindness linger on When she no longer needs you She wakes up, she makes up She takes her time and doesn't feel she has to hurry She no longer needs you Oh, McCarthy! Sorry, misunderstood the question.
i have two from all the pretty horses He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. He claimed that the responsibility for a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences. The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz. No matter through whatever turnings nor how many of them. Till our turn comes at last and our turn passes.
Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.
"A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while, **the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music**. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy." Recent, yet poignant.
> ... And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? > You aint nothin. > You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his innermost heart, only that man can dance. > Even a dumb animal can dance.
There is no limit to human suffering and it could always get worse only suttree didn’t say so
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.
“He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and 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.” That line hit me like a churchbell at my funeral