How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from No Country for Old Men.
Quote #7
"You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair, bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you."
Here you have a guy—Ed Tom's friend from El Paso—complaining about kids with green hair when there are people getting murdered by drug gangs all around him. Sorry, guy, but we really don't think aesthetic choices have much to do with it, so you'd better just take the world for what it is. (Now if all those gangs had green hair and nose-bones, we'd have another talk.)
Quote #8
"It's the tide. It's the dismal tide. It is not the one thing."
Here, Ed Tom's friend rejects Sheriff Bell's proposal that the world is falling to pieces because kids have stopped saying "sir" and "ma'am." It's not just one thing, he says; it's everything. The whole world is doomed, but it's not about declining social standards—it's just fate, like the tides. (Hm, sounds a lot like Chigurh when you put it that way.)
Quote #9
"I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, 'OK. I'll be part of this world.'"
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell isn't afraid of dying; he's just afraid of having his entire worldview shattered. (Well, gee, why would you be afraid of a little thing like that?) He's afraid of having to look at all the evil around him and saying, "Yeppers, this is the world I have to live in." Sure, he'd like to believe in something better, but the evidence just isn't here.