Sometimes you need to just stop and savor language.

This is one of those times. When we need to just stop and revel in the beauty of literature. Some quotes from McCarthy's The Crossing:

page 31--

"Before him the mountains were blinding white in the sun. They looked new born out of the hand of some improvident god who'd perhaps not even puzzled out a use for them. That kind of new."

page 45--

"He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there."

page 46--

"You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you don't have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back."

Little Prediction:
I think that Billy is going to catch this stinking wolf that they have been tracking and trying to trap since the beginning and then he is going to want to keep the wolf. He will train the wolf to be a pet, domesticate the wolf. But then it really won't be a wolf anymore, will it? He will take the wolf out of the animal. He'll have a pretty wicked pet, but it won't be the same. Just like the snowflake McCarthy talks about. You can look at a snowflake, but once you touch it, once you catch it in the palm of your hand you change the snowflake forever. It cannot be undone and it is no longer a snowflake.

page 46--

"The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only."

See what I mean?

page 47--

"He said that the boy should find that place where acts of God and those of man are of a piece. Where they cannot be distinguished."