Writing style

This is one night when it's just muddy and cold and they haven't eaten, but they have a fire:

...they sat there in silence with their hands held out to the flames. He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

And this was the morning after the passage Erin cited in the comment on the last post. I think it's insightful about his feeling for the woman and their past and how the past should be "handled." Normally we think the past is preserved in remembering and in story telling, but this is another take:

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

I love that. It also seems relavant to his writing style, which is sparing — simple sentences, or often just sentence fragments, a plain, unassuming, yet stunning, vocabulary. I had the feeling, after reading the passage above, that when he's writing he's calling on a rich, probably overwhelming, storehouse of experience and distilling it to an essence, not just to create a story, but so as to do the least amount of violence to the original thing. There's the thing. And then there's the story of the thing. And the poetic feeling of "truth" that we readers experience is the emotional loyalty between those two.

(Trust me. That makes a lot more sense if you mull it at 2 a.m. in a hot bath with a cup of tea)

But, my question: Did you enjoy McCarthy's writing style? Was it hard to get used to? Did the unconventional prose, with all the fragments and contractions without apostrophes and direct speech without quotation marks sit well with you? Why do you think he drops quotation marks? Is it to integrate the speech fully into the narrative? (There must be a lot written about this because he seems to do it in all his books).