Quotes from Child of God

“At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“White pussy is nothin but trouble.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity. a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“I remember back a number of years, talkin about fairs, they had a old boy come through would shoot live pigeons with ye. Him with a rifle and you with a shotgun. Or anything else. He must of had a truckload of pigeons. Had a boy out in the middle of a field with a crateful and he’d holler and the boy’d let one slip and he’d raise his rifle and blam, he’d dust it. Misters, he could strictly make the feathers fly. We’d never seen the like of shootin. They was a bunch of us pretty hotshot birdhunters lost our money out there fore we got it figured out. What he was doin, this boy was loadin the old pigeons up the ass with them little firecrackers. They’d take off like they was home free and get up about so high and blam, it’d blow their asses out. He’d just shoot directly he seen the feathers fly. You couldn’t tell it. Or I take that back, somebody did finally. I don’t remember who it was. Reached and grabbed the rifle out of the old boy’s hand fore he could shoot and the old pigeon just went blam anyways. They like to tarred and feathered him over it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“All patched up out of parts and lowslung and bumping over the ruts. Filled with old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“​His other few possessions lay about in the grotto where chance had arranged them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“You think people was meaner then than they are now? The deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town.
No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“IN THE SPRING OR WARMER weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. Ballard”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

“See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed & the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history & will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns & cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God

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“How're we getting to King's Cross tomorrow, Dad?" asked Fred as they dug into a sumptuous pudding.
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“Tom felt that it was time to wake up; this sort of life might be romantic enough, in his blighted condition, but it was getting to have too little sentiment and too much distracting variety about it. So he thought over various plans for relief, and finally hit pon that of professing to be fond of Pain-killer. He asked for it so often that he became a nuisance, and his aunt ended by telling him to help himself and quit bothering her. If it had been Sid, she would have had no misgivings to alloy her delight; but since it was Tom, she watched the bottle clandestinely. She found that the medicine did really diminish, but it did not occur to her that the boy was mending the health of a crack in the sitting-room floor with it.

One day Tom was in the act of dosing the crack when his aunt's yellow cat came along, purring, eying the teaspoon avariciously, and begging for a taste. Tom said:

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Peter was sure.

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Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth open and poured down the Pain-killer. Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a war-whoop and set off round and round the room, banging against furniture, upsetting flower-pots, and making general havoc. Next he rose on his hind feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of enjoyment, with his head over his shoulder and his voice proclaiming his unappeasable happiness. Then he went tearing around the house again spreading chaos and destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time to see him throw a few double summersets, deliver a final mighty hurrah, and sail through the open window, carrying the rest of the flower-pots with him. The old lady stood petrified with astonishment, peering over her glasses; Tom lay on the floor expiring with laughter.”
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“One of us in this very room is in fact the murderer.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from And Then There Were None

“Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other… ”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, quote from The Master and Margarita

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