No Country for Old Men Strength and Skill Quotes

Here's Llewellyn Moss right after Anton Chigurh threatens to kill his wife. Strong? Yeah, we guess. He's definitely standing up for his lady, if that's the sort of thing you like. But—we're going to say it—isn't he being just a wee bit selfish here? Looks like strength doesn't necessarily equal smarts.

Carla Jean stands by her man. She has total faith in Llewellyn's strength and skill, and we have to admit she has reason. As the movie goes on, though, and Llewellyn realizes that he's matched with baddies above his pay grade, her confidence drains away—and so does ours.

Moss lies in bed one night staring at the ceiling, thinking about the posse of drug dealers on his trail. Like you do. After a while, he realizes that there's just no way anyone could have ever tracked him as quickly as the Mexicans have. He jumps out of bed and searches his money briefcase to find a radio tracking device stashed in the cash. Okay, it's smart of him to figure this out. But he's also unfortunately too late: Chigurh has already found him. Better luck next time, dude.

Llewellyn just might have a bit of a hero complex. He's just an ordinary guy, after all—yeah, maybe a little smarter and tougher than your average bear, but still not cut out for taking on Anton Chigurh. In the end, he's just some poor sap who stumbled across the wrong botched drug deal at the wrong time. Being strong enough to survive Vietnam doesn't exactly equip him to take on pure evil.

Given that the bubonic plague killed about one in three people and that Chigurh, with his little coin-flip trick, should statistically be killing about one in two, we're going to go ahead and say that Chigurh is actually more dangerous than the plague. And Wells respects that. From one killer to another, he has to admire, just a little bit, for how deadly and resourceful Anton Chigurh is. But Wells has his own skill: a cocky sense of humor that helps him man up to the danger he's constantly up again. Too bad that he didn't also think to bring along a bullet-proof—er, steer-killer-proof—vest.

You can just see Carson Wells doing some fake boo-hooing here with absolutely no sympathy for Llewellyn Moss. At the end of the day, Wells is a professional who cares a lot more about money than he does about other people—and he's got the skills to back it up, or so he thinks. This time, though, he's overestimated himself. Guess there's limit to human ingenuity, especially when you match it up against something that seems pretty darn inhuman.

Carson Wells has a mind for details. Well, you'd have to if you were working as a private mercenary. You wouldn't want to go after the wrong drug dealer by accident, now, would you? Success in this world is all about fitting your skills to your career—at least, that's what Shmoop has always said.

For someone who's about to hunt down Anton Chigurh, Carson Wells seems pretty sure of himself. Big mistake. Huge. Despite all his skill, his confidence turns out to be undeserved. He barely even gets to throw a menacing glare at Chigurh before the psycho takes him out.

Carson Wells has been in this whole evading psycho killers game before, and he feels like it's his duty to tutor Llewellyn Moss on all the things he's done wrong in trying to avoid Anton Chigurh—like failing to notice the tracking device hidden in the money he stole. Moss is a proud man though and he doesn't want to be lectured on all the things he's done wrong. Give the guy some credit; he did figure it out eventually, after all.

Llewellyn Moss knows how to make things up as he goes along. In this case, he leaves his motel room because he's convinced that a group of bad dudes have tracked him down. Now his only hope for recovering his money is to create a really long hooked pole and retrieve his money from a motel's air duct from the opposite side of the motel. Little does he know that his efforts accidentally lead Anton Chigurh to murder the three Mexican men who are after him. Sometimes you need a little skill and a lot of luck—and luck is one thing that Moss is out of.