The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierra and the the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made these names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us.

— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

The wind blew all night. It burned up the fire and burned up the coals of the fire and the balled and twisted shape of redhot wire burned briefly like the incandescent armature of an enormous heart in the night’s darkness and then faded to black and the wind blew the coals to ash and blew the ash away and scoured the clay where the coals and ash had been till other than the blackened wire there was no trace of fire at all and all night things passed in the dark that had of themselves no articulation yet had a destination for that.

— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

So everything is necessary. Every last 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 ways in which the world is made.

— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing