How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from No Country for Old Men.
Quote #1
Gas station attendant: I didn't put nothing up.
Chigurh: Yes, you did. You've been putting it up your whole life. You just didn't know it.
Here, Anton Chigurh is talking to the gas station attendant, who says he didn't "put nothing up," i.e. didn't bet anything. Not the way Chigurh looks at it. He's convinced that human beings risk their lives every second of every day just by being alive. After all, every second you live is a second that you could possibly die. Gee, that's cheerful.
Quote #2
"Anywhere not in your pocket. Or it'll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is."
Wait, hang up—we're confused. On the one hand, the coin Chigurh flips has some sort of special relationship with fate. On the other hand, it's just a regular coin like any other. So which is it? For Chigurh, they're somehow one and the same.
Quote #3
"Yeah, he's a psychopathic killer, but so what? There's plenty of them around."
Carson Wells has the most laid-back philosophy of anyone in this movie. For him, there's nothing special about Anton Chigurh. He's just a particularly dangerous psycho killer. But who cares? Those people are a dime a dozen in Wells's world, and if one doesn't get you, then another one will.
Quote #4
"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"
Chigurh likes to taunt Carson Wells about his laid-back philosophy once he has a gun on him. It's clear that Chigurh is going to kill Wells no matter what. But even a cold-blooded guy like Chigurh can't help indulge himself in a little Evil Gloating, telling Wells that his entire worldview is useless because it has led him to such a shameful end.
Quote #5
"You need to call it. I can't call it for you."
Anton Chigurh is a psychopathic killer, but he still lives by a strict moral code based around the assumption that randomness is the only consistent force in human life. He expresses this belief by flipping a coin to decide whether he'll kill somebody, but the only way he can make the flip legitimate though is if he lets the other person call it. Anything else, according to his philosophy, would be unfair. Hey, we said he had a code.
Quote #6
"The coin don't have no say. It's just you."
When Chigurh comes to kill her, Carla Jean Moss refuses to participate in his messed-up worldview and won't let Chigurh believe he's acting randomly. At the end of the day, Carla Jean believes that Anton Chigurh is a human being like any other who's responsible for his own actions—and that just might make her his most effective opponent.
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.
Quote #10
"The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure."
Sheriff Ed Tom is an old man. He's not going to be around forever, whether he's taken out by heart disease or by some psycho like Chigurh. So death doesn't faze him much. But he is afraid that all the decency in the world is gone, and he's just leaving behind a big old mess.