All The Pretty Horses Quotes

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites 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.

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I’d made before it.

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

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

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.

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 ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. (All the Pretty Horses)

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.

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

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.

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he’d seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

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

It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

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

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

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.