Blood Meridian (Picador Classic Book 32)

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such tak

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the

What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys.

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

This is what Great Art does. It becomes more real than the real, more true than the truth. It is the mechanism by which our mythologies form.

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.