10 Animals Meditating On Their Favorite Cormac McCarthy Quotes

These desert creatures think Cormac McCarthy might be their spirit animal.

1. Child of God changed this adorable burro's life.

Fernando López / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: ferlomu

"Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath."

2. When this coyote read The Crossing, she thought, "Someone really understands me."

David Grimes / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: grimeshome

"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless."

3. All the Pretty Horses helped this Mojave rattlesnake through a painful breakup.

Josh Hardison / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: 27495396@N07

"He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."

4. This curmudgeonly grasshopper mouse re-reads Suttree every couple of years.

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"How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it."

5. This lonely cottontail rabbit philosophizes to any who will listen about Blood Meridian.

Matt Reinbold / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: furryscalyman

"War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."

6. This desert wolf was skeptical about a movie adaptation, but he thought the Coen Brothers did a great job with his favorite book, No Country For Old Men.

Beth Hoffman / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: adventuresinlibrarianship

"When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way."

7. This horned viper thought Blood Meridian laid bare the violence inherent in nature.

Alexandre Roux / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: 30142279@N07

"The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."

8. These pronghorn antelope belong to a Cormac McCarthy book club. Currently reading: his debut, The Orchard Keeper.

photogramma1 / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: photogramma1

"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."

9. This mountain lion wrote its PhD dissertation on The Crossing.

Angell Williams / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: 53357045@N02

"So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall."

10. And as for these round-tailed ground squirrels, their parents have been reading Cities of the Plain to them every night this week.

SearchNet Media / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: searchnetmedia

"The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dimmed and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams encased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night."