The Orchard Keeper Quotes

“They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth's crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth's wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with root, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether. He listened. Above the black ranks of trees the mid-summer sky arched cloudless and coldly starred. He lay back and stared at it and after a while he slept.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“In the dark glass where the road poured down their cigarettes rose and fell like distant semaphores above the soft green dawn of the dashlights.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“I busted him and he busted me. That's fair ain't it?

No, I ain't forgettin about jail. You think because he arrested me that thows it off again I reckon? I don't. It's his job. It's what he gets paid for. To arrest people that break the law. And I didn't jest break the law, I made a livin at it. More money in three hours than any workin man makes in a week. Why is that? Because it's harder work? No, because a man who makes a livin doin somethin that has to get him in jail sooner or later has to be paid for the jail, has to be paid in advance not jest for his time breakin the law but for the time he has to build when he gets caught at it. So I been paid. Gifford's been paid. Nobody owes nobody. If it wadn't for Gifford, the law, I wouldn't of had the job I had blockadin and if it wadn't for me blockadin, Gifford wouldn't of had his job arrestin blockaders. Now who owes who?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Housecats is smart too. Smarter’n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain’t on account of you cain’t learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won’t learn nothin. They too smart.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening,”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“A man gets older, he said, he finds they’s lots of things he can do jest as well without and so he don’t have to worry about this and that the way a young feller will. I worked near all my life and never had nothin. Seems like a old man’d be allowed his rest but then he comes to find they’s things you have to do on account of nobody else wants to attend to em... Most ever man loves peace, he said, and none better than a old man.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“The mountain road brick-red of dust laced with lizard tracks, coming up through the peach orchard, hot, windless, cloistral in a silence of no birds save one vulture hung in the smokeblue void of the sunless mountainside, rocking on the high updrafts, and the road turning and gated with bullbriers waxed and green, and the green cadaver grin sealed in the murky waters of the peach pit, slimegreen skull with newts coiled in the eyesockets and a wig of moss.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“I could tell you why—and you stit wouldn’t know. That’s all right. You can set and ast a bunch of idjit questions. But not knowin a thing ain’t never made it not so. Well, I’m a old man and I’ve seen some hard times, so I don’t reckon Brushy Mountain’ll be the worst place I was ever in.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“See the hand that nursed the serpent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“The old man remembered it now with dim regret, and remembered such nights when the air was warm as a breath and the moon no dead thing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“They produced tobacco and papers and passed them to him not ceremoniously but with that deprecatory gesture of humility which country people confer in a look, a lift of the hand.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“They came three times for the old man. At first it was just the Sheriff and Gifford. They were one foot up the porch steps when he swung the door open and threw down on them and they could see the mule ears of the old shotgun laid back viciously along the locks. They turned and went back down the yard, not saying anything or even looking back, and the old man closed the door behind them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Turkey buzzard, Warn explained. They’s the ones got red heads.
Where do you keep him?
Been keepin him in the smokehouse, he said.
Don’t nobody care for you to keep him?
Naw. The old lady set up a fuss but I told her I was goin to bring him in the house and learn him to set at table and that calmed her down some. Here, don’t get too close or he’ll puke on ye. He puked on Rock and Rock like to never got over it—stit won’t have nothin to do with him. Don’t nobody think much of him I reckon but me. I like him cause he’s about a mean son of a bitch and twice as ugly.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Don't nobody think much of him I reckon but me. I like him cause he's a mean son of a bitch and twice as ugly.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“The match scratched and popped. Sylder meditated in the windshield the face of the man cast in orange and black above the spurt of flame like the downlidded face of some copper ikon, a mask, not ambiguous or inscrutable but merely discountenanced of meaning, expression. In the flickery second in which Sylder's glance went to the road and back the man's eyes raised to regard him in the glass, so that when Sylder looked back they faced each other over the cup of light like enemy chieftains across a council fire for just that instant before the man's lips pursed, carplike, still holding the cigarette, and sucked away the flame.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“The great dome stood complacent, huge. seeming older than the very dirt, the rocks, as if it had spawned them of itself and stood surveying the work, clean and coldly gleaming and capable of infinite contempt.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“The great dome stood complacent, huge, seeming older than the very dirt, the rocks, as if it had spawned them of itself and stood surveying the work, clean and coldly gleaming and capable of infinite contempt.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“In the store the old men gathered, occupying for endless hours the creaking milkcases, speaking slowly and with conviction upon matters of profound inconsequence, eying the dull red bulb of the stove with their watery vision. Shrouded in their dark coats they had a vulturuous look about them, their faces wasted and thin, their skin dry and papery as a lizard's. John Shell, looking like nothing so much as an ill-assembled manikin of bones on which clothes were hung in sagging dusty folds, his wrists protruding like weathered sticks from his flapping prelate sleeves, John Shell unhinged his toothless jaw with effort, a slight audible creaking sound, to speak his one pronouncement: It ain't so much that as it is one thing'n another.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“In the glass cases roaches scuttled, a dry rattling sound as they traversed the candy in broken ranks, scaled the glass with licoriced feet, their segmented bellies yellow and flat.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Toward late morning a rooster called and the old man's window blushed in a soft wash of rose. He slept and color drained from the glass and the east paled ash-gray.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Across the yard, brilliant against a facade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“The trees were all encased in ice, limbless-looking where their black trunks rose in aureoles of lace, bright seafans shimmering in the wind and tinkling with an endless bell-like sound, a carillon in miniature, and glittering shards of ice falling in sporadic hail everywhere through the woods and making the snow with incomprehensible runes.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“From a lightwire overhead, dangling head downward and hollowed to the weight of ashened feathers and fluted bones, a small owl hung in an attitude of forlorn exhortation, its wizened talons locked about the single strand of wire. It stared down from dark and empty sockets, penduluming softly in the bitter wind.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“Through a gap in the trees he could see the valley far below him where the river ran, a cauldron in the mountain's shadow where smoke and spume seethed like the old disturbance of the earth erupting once again, black mist languid in the cuts and trenches as flowing lava and the palisades of rock rising in the high-shored rim beyond the valley-and beyond the valley, circling the distant hoary cupolas now standing into morning, the sun, reaching to the slope where the old man rested, speared mist motes emblematic as snowflakes and broke them down in spangled and regimental disorder, reached the trees and banded them in light, struck weftwork in the slow uncurling ferns-the sun in its long lightfall recoined again in leafwater.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“They go on-steps soft now in the rank humus earth, or where carapaced with lichens the texture of old green velvet, or wet and spongy earth tenoned with roots, the lecherous ganglia of things growing-coming down, pursuing the shadowline into the smoking river valley.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“He's a rogue and a outlaw hisself and you're welcome to shoot him, burn him down in his bed, any damn thing, because he's a traitor to boot and maybe a man steals from greed or murders in anger but he sells his own neighbors out for money and it's few lie that deep in the pit, that far beyond the pale.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper