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Book: The Orchard Keeper
Quotes of Book: The Orchard Keeper

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Cormac McCarthy _ The Orchard Keeper
And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt."
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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.
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