This blog is dedicated to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?-McCarthy 27
If you break little promises you'll break big ones. That's what you said.-McCarthy 29
No lists of things to be done. the day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.-McCarthy 46
People were always getting ready for tomorrow.-McCarthy 142
I didnt believe in that.
Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.
It didnt even know they were there.
Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.-McCarthy 160
Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts-McCarthy 230
You forget some things, dont you?-McCarthy 10
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Take my hand, he said. I don't think you should see this.-McCarthy 161
What you put in your head is there forever?
Yes.
It's okay Papa.
It's okay?
They're already there.
I dont want you to look.
They'll still be there.
In the shallows beyond the breakwater an ancient corpse rising and falling among the driftwood. He wished he could hide it from the boy but the boy was right. What was there to hide?-McCarthy 199
I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary.-McCarthy 31
What about dreams? You used to tell me dreams sometimes.-McCarthy 227-228
I dont want to talk about anything.
Okay.
I dont have good dreams anyway. They're always about something bad happening. You said that was okay because good dreams are not a good sign.
Maybe. I dont know.
When you wake up coughing you walk out along the road or somewhere but I can still hear you coughing.
I'm sorry.
One time I heard you crying.
I know.
So if I shouldnt cry you shouldnt cry either.
Okay.
Is your leg going to get better?
Yes.
You're not just saying that.
No.
Because it looks really hurt.
It's not that bad.
The man was trying to kill us. Wasnt he.
Yes. He was.
Did you kill him?
No.
Is that the truth?
Yes.
Okay.
Is that all right?
Yes.
I thought you didnt want to talk?
I dont.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.-McCarthy 70
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.
Because we're the good guys.-McCarthy 108-109
Yes.
And we're carrying the fire.
And we're carrying the fire. Yes.
The salt wood burned orange and blue in the fire's heart and he sat watching it a long time.-McCarthy 200
The fire flared in the wind and sparks raced away down the sand.-McCarthy 200
I want to be with you.-McCarthy 234
You cant.
Please.
You cant. You have to carry the fire.
I dont know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I dont know where it is.
Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it.
Are we going to die?-McCarthy 9
Sometime. Not now.
Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts-McCarthy 230
They picked their way among the mummied figures. The black skin stretched upon the bones and their faces split and shrunken on their skulls. Like victims of some ghastly envacuuming. Passing them in silence down that silent corridor through the drifting ash where they struggled forever in the road's cold coagulate.-McCarthy 161
He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? the boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.-McCarthy 167
They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.-McCarthy 187
The boy was sitting up wrapped in his blanket.-McCarthy 154
What is it?
Nothing. I had a bad dream.
What did you dream about?
Nothing.
Are you okay?
No.
He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said.
I was crying. But you didnt wake up.
I'm sorry. I was just so tired.
I meant in the dream.
They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. the world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat you children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.-McCarthy 153
There was an oldfashioned drugstore there with a black marble counter and chrome stools with tattered plastic seats patched with electrical tape. The pharmacy was looted but the store itself was oddly intact. Expensive electronic equipment sat unmolested on the shelves. He stood looking the place over. Sundries. Notions. What are these? He took the boy's hand and led him out but the boy had already seen it. A human head beneath a cakebell at the end of the counter. Dessicated. Wearing a bellcap. Dried eyes turned sadly inward.-McCarthy 155