He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.
Where men cant live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone. So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true. Things will be better when everybody’s gone.
What you wants with these goats anyway? Little or nothin. Good fresh milk. God’s best cheese. You have any other animals? said Suttree. Dog or anything? No. Just goats. I think a feller gets started with goats he just more or less sticks to goats.
One thing about me, when I’m wrong I’ll admit it. Well. That’s a good trait to have.
The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway.
This is a dog. He is dead too. This.
That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.
On Gay Street the traffic lights are stilled. The trolleyrails gleam in their beds and a late car passes with a long slish of tires. In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching shape in the glass of the depot door. His fetch come up from life’s other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand.
Suttree ducked the yardlong coil of dead flies that hung from the ceiling and came to the counter with his purchases.
In this world the mask is what is true.
Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.
They stood among their horses in the squalid little alameda while the wind ransacked the trees and the birds nesting in the gray twilight cried out and clutched the limbs and the snow swirled and blew across the little square and shrouded the shapes of the mud buildings beyond and made mute the cries of the vendors who’d followed them.
He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again.
The Apache wrenched his pony’s head around and when Glanton spun to look at his men he found them frozen in deadlock with the savages, they and their arms wired into a construction taut and fragile as those puzzles wherein the placement of each piece is predicated upon every other and they in turn so that none can move for bringing down the structure entire.
Where the bodies are buried in the desert is a certain world, Counselor. Where they are simply left in the street is another. That is a country heretofore unknown to me. But it must have always been there, must it not?
Are you no afraid of God? I got no reason to be afraid of God. I’ve even got a bone or two to pick with Him. You.
He knew that those things we most desire to hold in our hearts are often taken from us while that which we would put away seems often by that very wish to become endowed with unsuspected powers of endurance.
He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.
The names of entities that have the power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity.
The mountain road brick-red of dust laced with lizard tracks, coming up through the peach orchard, hot, windless, cloistral in a silence of no birds save one vulture hung in the smokeblue void of the sunless mountainside, rocking on the high updrafts, and the road turning and gated with bullbriers waxed and green, and the green cadaver grin sealed in the murky waters of the peach pit, slimegreen skull with newts coiled in the eyesockets and a wig of moss.