Randall

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. 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.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

“Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. He keeps from off the king’s road for fear of citizenry. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in a grassy draw where he’d gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the color of steel. His mounted shadow falls for miles before him. He wears on his head a hat he’s made from leaves and they have dried and cracked in the sun and he looks like a raggedyman wandered from some garden where he’d used to frighten birds.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

“The kid looked at the man. His head was strangely narrow and his hair was plastered up with mud in a bizarre and primitive coiffure. On his forehead were burned the letters H T and lower and almost between the eyes the letter F and these markings were splayed and garish as if the iron had been left too long. When he turned to look at the kid the kid could see that he had no ears.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

“Like battlefield casualties dryly reported from someone else’s distant war, these unadorned numbers scarcely convey the decimation of American community life they represent. In round numbers every single percentage-point drop represents two million fewer Americans involved in some aspect of community life every year. So, the numbers imply, we now have sixteen million fewer participants in public meetings about local affairs, eight million fewer committee members, eight million fewer local organizational leaders, and three million fewer men and women organized to work for better government than we would have had if Americans had stayed as involved in community affairs as we were in the mid-1970s.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community