The Road by Cormac McCarthy

• Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.

• Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth

• Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory

• We used to talk about death, she said. We dont any more. Why is that? I dont know. It’s because it’s here. There’s nothing left to talk about.

• They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves.

• They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn

• He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

• The nights were blinding cold and casket black

• There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness

• Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all.

• People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.

• It wouldnt make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.

• When we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He’ll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He’ll say: Where did everybody go? And that’s how it will be. What’s wrong with that?

• Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row.

• When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you.

• Odd things scattered by the side of the road. Electrical appliances, furniture. Tools. Things abandoned long ago by pilgrims enroute to their several and collective deaths…

• The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin. Running naked and leaping and screaming into the slow roll of the surf.

• I will do what I promised, he whispered. No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.

• The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared

• There was rain in the wind

• He took the cup and moved away and when he moved the light moved with him.