Take care with whom you break bread

Last batch of All The Pretty Horses. The very best part of the book is the senorita's speech. Stick around for that.

Poverty leads to a man's judging of readiness to kill for the money.

Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill.

Definitely quoting this in the future. Just spit out that poison.

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you.

LOVE it: a person of value must not run from misfortune, despite anything. This quality must be a "form of constancy." Anyone who abandons first becomes a coward, and abandoning this value makes anything else redundant.

I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

Speaks to my childhood:

It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

Like a blank of mind:

...and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.

Nice:

Blood's blood. It dont know where it come from.

Good 'slogan.' Sacred money = religious money? Money that doesn't exist? Money with fate predetermined by God? Most thought-provoking bit of the quote. A worried man can't love... reminds me of Woolf's "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.

Eternity of life before its end and the evil of it:

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.

This is just a beautiful quote, no analysis needed, really. It's lovely.

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

A refusal to choose a destiny does not mean the fates will not.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

Last quote... what shape in lives? What pattern after fact? The repetition of history, of failure? Do we see its forming from birth? Or does it develop from all our dumb choices? If it isn't set out before us, how do we walk that path? If there is no shape at all are we even something? We are not.
Otherwise, we are nothing.
Otherwise, we are nothing.

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.