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The fact that we had neither nicotine nor caffeine also contributed to the state of apathy and irritability.

A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.

The salvation of man is through love and in love. 37
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not his is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. 38

Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow.

Delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.

“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” Nietzsche

We are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. (307)
She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years. (315)

Hack away you mean red “fella”, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple.

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the trusted form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it bings them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

Glanton’s eyes in their dark sockets were burning centroids of murder and he and his haggard riders stared balefully at the kid as if he were no part of them for all they were so like in wretchedness of circumstance.

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear.Superstition will drag him down.The rain will erode the deeds of his life.But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate

On that raw tablestone the flames of their bale fire swirled and circled and they studied the arrant blackness under them where it fell away like the sheer cloven face of the world.

All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon.

Blood bubbled from the man’s chest and he turned his lost eyes upward, already glazed, the capillaries breaking up. In those dark pools there sat each a small and perfect sun.

His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night.

For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of many creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and muster and a residue of nameless rags. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity.

For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

But don’t draw me, said Webster. For I don’t want in your book.
My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein its writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.

But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everything drawers in a book is so.

Where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there’s no up nor down to it.

For this will go deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

Books lie, he said
God don’t lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a stew and then that too was stilled. He was sat as before saved headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone.