You’re counting right. Three quotes from No Country for Old Men, which makes it, by this measure, the “most quotable” American movie of the 21st Century. And more than that, it claims three spots between #6 and #19. So why No Country? What makes this movie such a fountain for great quotes?

1. The Coen Brothers, who threatened to take the belt for best American screenwriter back in the 1980s, had both hands on it for Fargo, kept it because while they were rewriting The Ladykillers everyone else was putzing around and trying to write Babel, and haven’t been remotely threatened ever since.
2. Cormac McCarthy has something to do with it, I imagine. Even if you’re a McCarthy skeptic (and there must not be that many, because I follow enough mourning people on Twitter that if there were any, the quote tweeting dogpiles would have been fierce), the man’s immediately recognizable style, to say nothing of actual lines from the book, have seeped into the picture. Certainly the Coens, who are trying to forget that they adapted The Ladykillers, have made a point since McCarthy’s death of saying that the only two authors [sic] they’ve adapted are Homer and McCarthy.
3. Perhaps even more important than both of those ingredients, or to put it another way, the harmony of those two ingredients creates a film which makes for a bunch of good lines. The movie is built on conversations, but those conversations overwhelmingly set up two people speaking sparsely to one another. Their cadence is slower. You can hear Josh Brolin saying, “What’s this guy supposed to be, the ultimate badass” without hearing Woody Harrelson leading into it. You can hear Woody Harrelson saying, “Compared to what, the bubonic plague?” without even remembering that Stephen Root prompts the question. Put that together with the one-sided conversations, the all-thrust no-parry style of speech that Bardem has, and then fold in Tommy Lee Jones and his love of a a good monologue, and you have a pretty complete recipe for an unbelievably quotable picture.

Like the coin toss quote, this one says much about Chigurh and the need to decide that he himself would denounce. Suffice it to say he is not a man who trusts the process, and in his deterministic universe, it’s reasonable enough that he wouldn’t. The rules that other people follow, to be a little too decent, to not take circumstances to the nastiest conclusion, to let down one’s guard: these are the rules that lead people to their final moments. On the other hand, the rule that Chigurh follows brings him to Carla Jean, and going to Carla Jean means that he’s got a bone sticking out of his arm the last time we see him.