In the smoking dawn the party riding ragged and bloody with their baled peltries looked less like victors than the harried afterguard of some ruined army retreating across the meridians of chaos and old night, the horses stumbling, the men tottering asleep in the saddles.
Everywhere hung portraits of blacks, strange family groups where the faces watched gravely from out of their paper past. Hanging in the dark like galleries of condemned.
The laws of mathematics supposedly derive from the rules of logic. But there is no argument for the rules of logic that does not presuppose them.
He stood in the center of the square where the tracks of commerce lay fossilized in dried mud about him, turning, an amphitheatrical figure in that moonwrought waste manacled to a shadow that struggled grossly in the dust.
If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death.
I think that there is love in my heart. It just shows up as pity. I imagine that I’ve seen the horror of the world but I know that’s not true. Still, you can’t put back what you’ve seen. There has never been a century so grim as this one. Does anyone seriously think that we’ve seen the last of its like? And yet what can the world’s troubles mean to someone unable to shoulder her own?
My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Coming downriver an antique schooner running under bare poles. Black hull, gold plimsoll. Passing under the bridge and down along the gray riverfront. Phantom of grace.
People prefer fate to chance.
Fate can be appeased, gods prayed to. But chance is just what it says.
You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you can’t help but lose what is being described.
A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.
All of history a rehearsal for its own extinction.
In his hand he held a longbarreled sixshot Colt’s patent revolver. It was a huge sidearm meant for dragoons and it carried in its long cylinders a rifle’s charge and weighed close to five pounds loaded.
What should give you pause is that suicides scales with intelligence in the animal kingdom and you might wonder if this is not true of individuals as well as species.
No matter the magnitude of your doubts about the nature of the world you can’t come up with another world without coming up with another you. It may even be that everybody starts out fairly unique only most people get over it.
No, said the blind man. I do not mean in this house. I mean here. Among us.
The stars in flood above her. The lower edges of the firmament sawed out into the black shapes of the mountains and the lights of the cities burning on the plain like stars pooled in a lake.
The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he’d guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sand-bags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.
They used to pester me about gettin married again and I was near sixty when my wife died. My sister in law primarily. I’d done already had the best woman ever was. Aint nobody goin to be that lucky twice runnin.