He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

I finished this book today. Every time I read a Cormac McCarthy novel, he creeps further up my list of favorite authors. I’ve read Blood Meridian, The Road, and All the Pretty Horses now.  I think I’ll read No Country For Old Men, and then on to the rest of The Border Trilogy next, but first I’m going to read Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.

I also really like this passage from the NYTimes review of All the Pretty Horses:

His project is unlike that of any other writer: to make artifacts composed of human language but detached from a human reference point. That sense of evil that seems to suffuse his novels is illusory; it comes from our discomfort in the presence of a system that is not scaled to ourselves, within which our civilizations may be as ephemeral as flowers. The deity that presides over Mr. McCarthy’s world has not modeled itself on humanity; its voice most resembles the one that addressed Job out of the whirlwind.