The Caravan of Carnival Folk That Begins Child of God

From the opening scene of the novel, which is the setting for the origin of Lester Ballard's eminent descent into degeneracy:

They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truck bed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinned and gesturing to the others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. 

–Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, 3.

Stone Figures Quarried from the Architecture of an Older Time

It was late afternoon when they set forth again, out from the town, the wheels rasping in the sand, back down the yellow road. Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew.

On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

–Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, 77.

Strung Out in Silhouette Against the Sun

The first sentence of Outer Dark (which I think sets the tone and ethos of the narrative that follows):

THEY CRESTED OUT on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and slowly high above the river and with something of its own implacability, pausing and grouping for a moment and going on again strung out in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well.

–Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, 4. Capitalization and emphasis in the original typography.

Like Fairybook Beasts

Spectators drifted away, the narrow street emptied. Some of the Americans had wandered into the cold waters of the stream and were splashing about and they clambered dripping into the street and stood dark and smoking and apocalyptic in the dim lampfall.

The night was cold and they shambled steaming through the cobbled town like fairybook beasts and it had begun to rain again.

–Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 190.

The First and Last Line of Blood Meridian

See the child.

He says that he will never die.

 –Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, pp. 3 and 327 (in the 1992 Vintage edition).

McCarthy Monday: Chigurh Thinks

McCarthy's No Country for Old Men follows a rough, cold-blooded hitman named Chigurh (pronounced "sug-ar") who is tracking down a man (Moss) carrying 2.4 million dollars of stolen drug-money.

The money bag has a tracking device, and Chigurh is carrying the unit that tracks it. At one point, as Chigurh returns to a hotel where he previously had a shoot-out with the man he is hunting, the transponder unit begins to beep. McCarthy then gives us a glimpse of Chigurh's cruelly collected, cognitive processes at work:

He could think of no reason for the transponder sending unit to be in the hotel. He ruled out Moss because he thought Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group.

Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that.  

—McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, p. 171

The Ugly Intertextual Fact

The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.

—Cormac McCarthy, quoted in "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," New York Times (April 19, 1992)