Child of God and The Sunset Limited

Some of my favourite lines from Cormac McCarthy's book Child of God, and from his play The Sunset Limited, which has been made into an excellent film with Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones making a wonderful job of the only two roles in it.

---

Child of God

Ballard, a misplaced and loveless simian shape scuttling across the turnaround as he had come, over the clay and thin gravel and the flattened beercans and papers and rotting condoms.

Ballard squatted on his heels in the yard opposite the visitor. They looked like constipated gargoyles.

The boar did not want to cross the river. When he did so it was too late. He came all sleek and steaming out of the willows on the near side and started across the plain. Behind him the dogs were falling down the mountainside hysterically, the snow exploding about them. When they struck the water they smoked like hot stones and when they came out of the brush and onto the plain they came in clouds of pale vapor.

Nothing moved in that dead and fabled waste, the woods garlanded with frostflowers, weeds spiring up from white crystal fantasies like the stone lace in a cave's floor.

You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.

---

The Sunset Limited

White: This place is a moral leper colony.

White: I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well, that would be the final nightmare.


Black: The light is all around you, but you don't see nothing but shadow, and you the one causing it. It's you, you're the shadow, that's the point.

Black: Maybe faith is just a case of having nothing else left.

White: My heart warms just thinking about it, blackness, aloneness, silence, peace, and all of it only a heartbeat away.


White: Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.

White: And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter.

White: If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldn't live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love.