Cities of the Plain

Some favourite lines from the last part of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. I didn't love it as much as the first two, still a great book though.

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Out in the street the rain slashed through the standing water driving the gaudy red and green colors of the neon signs to wander and seethe and rain danced on the steel tops of the cars parked along the curb.

Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?

There's a kind of man that when he cant have what he wants he wont take the next best thing but the worst he can find.

I think he was just lost. This world was never made for him. He'd outlived it before he could walk.

He gathered her black hair in his hand and spread it across his chest like a blessing.

In the dawn he held her while she slept and he had no need to ask her anything at all.

He could hear the slow bellows of her lungs and feel the blood pumping. He could hear the slow dull beating of the heart within her like an engine deep in a ship.

When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be, Billy said. You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.

To the south the distant lights of the city lay strewn across the desert floor like a tiara laid out upon a jeweler's blackcloth.

He knew how frail is the memory of loved ones. How we close our eyes and speak to them. How we long to hear their voices once again, and how those voices and those memories grow faint and faint until what was flesh and blood is nothing but echo and shadow. In the end perhaps not even that.
He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury of injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever.

Two owls crouching in the dust of the road turned their pale and heartshaped faces in the trucklights and blinked and rose on their white wings as silent as two souls ascending and vanished in the darkness overhead.

He turned and stood looking out the small barred window. Along the limits of the city where the roads died in the desert in sand washes and garbage dumps, out to the white perimeters at midday where smoke from the trashfires burned along the horizon like the signature of vandal hordes come in off the inscrutable wastes beyond.

To the south the thin green line of the river lay like a child's crayon mark across that mauve and bistre waste.