All The Pretty Horses Quotes

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

There is no greater monster than reason.

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

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.

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.

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

A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They’re always more trouble than what they’re worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.

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

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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

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

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.

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.