All the Pretty Horses Quotes

“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

“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.”

I don’t know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.”

“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 is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”

“The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”

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

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that 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.”

“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.”

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

“They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”

“What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the hearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.”

“He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.”

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

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”

“He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

“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.”