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Characters
The novel’s protagonist, if it can be said to have one, is the kid, but McCarthy shows us very little of the kid’s actions and thoughts. Born in 1833 to a poor family in Tennessee, the kid has an innate “taste for mindless violence,” and by the age of fourteen runs away from home to lead a dissolute and vicious life. Early on he falls in with Captain White’s army during its unauthorized invasion of Mexico, which results in the army’s destruction and the kid’s imprisonment in Chihuahua City. However, he is soon set free to ride with Captain Glanton’s gang of scalp hunters, contracted by the Chihuahuan government to hunt the Apaches. The kid proves himself an effective killer, yet, unlike his fellow scalp hunters, he also retains a shred of his humanity. He endangers his own life on several occasions to help and accommodate his comrades-in-arms, as when he removes the arrow from David Brown’s thigh when none else would, or spares Dick Shelby’s life in defiance of Glanton’s orders. For these small acts of mercy, the Judge accuses the kid of violating the gang’s amoral spirit of war for war’s sake, of poisoning its enterprise. In 1878, at the age of 45, the kid (by then called the man), is discovered brutally murdered in a Texas outhouse after an encounter with the Judge.
The kid Quotes in Blood Meridian
The Blood Meridian quotes below are all either spoken by The kid or refer to The kid. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
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Chapter 4
Quotes
The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted on the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.
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Chapter 21
Quotes
There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.
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Chapter 23
Quotes
The judge watched him. Was it always your idea, he said, that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?
You seen me.
The judge ignored this. I recognized when I first saw you and yet you were a disappointment to me. Then and now. Even so at the last I find you here with me.
I aint with you.
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Get the entire Blood Meridian LitChart as a printable PDF.
The kid Quotes in Blood Meridian
The Blood Meridian quotes below are all either spoken by The kid or refer to The kid. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
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Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4
Quotes
The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted on the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 21
Quotes
There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.
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Chapter 23
Quotes
The judge watched him. Was it always your idea, he said, that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?
You seen me.
The judge ignored this. I recognized when I first saw you and yet you were a disappointment to me. Then and now. Even so at the last I find you here with me.
I aint with you.
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Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
