Larry McMurtry Quotes

He had known several men who had lost limbs in battle; the men all claimed that they still felt things in the place where the limb had been. It was natural enough, then, that with Bill suddenly gone he and Gus would continue to have some of the feelings that went with friendship, even though the friend was gone.

It was a weakness, but he could not bear to disappoint women, even if it was ultimately for their own good.

Of all the women he knew, she had meant the most; and was the one person in his life he felt he had missed, in some ways.

Members of the Academy are mostly urban people. We are an urban nation. We are not a rural nation. It's not easy even to get a rural story made.

In times of crisis human beings don't have it in them to be rational.

It was as if his whole life had suddenly lodged in his throat, a raw bite he could neither spit out nor swallow.

I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live." Call

Today the sight that discourages book people most is to walk into a public library and see computers where books used to be. In many cases not even the librarians want books to be there. What consumers want now is information, and information increasingly comes from computers.
That is a preference I can't grasp, much less share, though I'm well aware that computers have many valid uses. They save lives, and they make research in most cases a thing that's almost instantaneous.
They do many good things.
But they don't really do what books do, and why should they usurp the chief function of a public library, which is to provide readers access to books? Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library.

He had hit with his closed fist and knocked her sprawling. It took talent to make Wyatt lose his temper, but Jessie knew just how to do it, and did it mainly just to have something happening. Pouring whiskey from bottle to glass was boring work.

He had learned in his years of tracking Indians that things which seemed impossible often weren't. They only became so if one thought about them too much so that fear took over.

I'd hate to read all these books ... that much reading could put your eyes out.

For most of the hours of the day - and most of the months of the year - the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans.

I see you're in a hurry to get someplace. It's a great mistake to hurry." "Why?" Joe asked, puzzled by almost everything the traveler said. "Because the grave's our destination," Mr. Sedgwick said. "Those who hurry usually get to it quicker than those who take their time.

Looking at her, though, was like looking at the hills. The hills stayed as they were. You could go them, if you had the means, but they extended no greeting.

They say money kinda melts when you take it across a border.

The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.

The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.

it seemed he had to be talking every waking minute as a means of holding his own fears in balance.

Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country.
Augustus McCrae

The first difference Newt noticed about being grown up was that time didn't pass as slow.

The seven of them rode for two hours into country that seemed to contain nothing except itself.

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

I could hear them whispering how Granddad had gone to a better place. They could think so and go to hell; I didn't believe it. Not unless dirt is a better place than air.

I don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it.

It's very peculiar, the situations life presents one with, Father Geoff reflected.

Virtually all his life he had been in the position of leading groups of men, yet the truth was he had never liked groups. Men he admired for their abilities in action almost always brought themselves down in his estimation if he had to sit around and listen to them talk - or watch them drink or play cards or run off after women. Listening to men talk usually made him feel more alone than if he were a mile away by himself under a tree. He had never really been able to take part in the talk. The endless talk of cards and women made him feel more set apart - and even a little vain. If that was the best they could think of, then they were lucky they had him to lead them. It seemed immodest, but it was a thought that often came to him.

I'll pass on snow myself, when I have the option.

Famous Shoes knew the young ranger was scared. Nothing was easier to detect in a man than fear. It showed even in the way he fumbled with his cup while drinking coffee; and it was normal that he would be afraid. He didn't know where he was,

It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live." ~spoken by Augustus McCrae

Losing weight. When we finish eating this horse I

Wantin' takes too much time ... I'd rather be working.

He turned the cylinder of the Colt and listened to the small, clear clicks it made. The grip was wood, the barrel cool and blue; the holster had kept a faint smell of saddle soap. He slipped the gun back in its holster, put the gun belt around his waist and felt the gun's solid weight against his hip. When he walked out into the lots to catch his horse, he felt grown and complete for the first time in his life.

There isn't a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes.

You are like me, a free man. The sky is your wife.

The best to do with a death was to move on from it.

It was something, what must go through men's mind where women were concerned, to cause them to behave so strangely.

Don't be trying to give back pain for pain ... You can't get even measures in business like this.

It was something he had always done - moved apart, so he could be alone and think things or a little.

I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.

He decided not to shoot the tall stranger, mainly because he admired his soft felt hat.

The thought crossed his mind that he ought to have married her and not gone rambling. If he had, he wouldn't be in such a fix. But he felt little fear; just an overpowering fatigue. Life had slipped out of line. It was unfair, it was too bad, but he couldn't find the energy to fight it any longer.

Do your best, if you happen to love a fool. You'll have my sympathy. Some folks will preach that it's a woman's duty never to quit, once you make a bond with a man. I say that's folly. A bond has to work two ways. If a man don't hold up his end, there comes a time to quit.

What would you know about anything, Jasper?" Augustus asked. "Age don't slow a man's whoring. It's lack of income that does that. No more prosperous than you look, I wouldn't think you'd know much about it.

I'm a fastidious bookman and have never liked reading books with library markings or other messy defects.

They say he missed that whore.

I don't guess I've watched you punish yourself for thirty years to be totally wrong about you.

By the time the shade had reached the river, Augustus would have mellowed with the evening and be ready for some intelligent conversation, which usually involved talking to himself.

all vessels leaked to some degree.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.

Don't be reviling yourself. None of us is such fine judges of what to do.

Maude Rainey was built like a barrel, with a bosom as big as buckets and a voice that some claimed would make hair fall out.

Why hell yes, Joe Bob! A cripple can always get himself a wooden leg, or a glass eye, or a metal hook for a hand, or any of that mess
but there ain't no known substitute for a big dick. I guess you is out of luck!

He himself had once been a man of firm opinion, but now it seemed to him that he knew almost nothing, whereas the words Clara flung at him were hard as rocks.

He had not stayed, but when he had gone, he hadn't fought, either. He had done nothing but ride twice over the same stretch of prairie, while death had come to both camps.

However, he didn't have a high opinion of the average man's ability as a fighter. The majority of men couldn't fight at all and even most outlaws were the merest amateurs when it came to battle. Few could shoot well, and even fewer had any mind for strategy.

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.

The sensible way, which he had pursued once or twice in his life, had always proved boring, usually within a few days.

The older the violin, the sweeter the music.

He didn't tell Newt all he knew. He didn't tell him that even when life seemed easy, it kept on getting harder.

It didn't do to ignore men. The majority of them were harmless, with nothing worse than a low capacity to irritate - they were worse than chiggers but not as bad as bedbugs, in her view.

You don't get the pint, Woodrow, I've walked the earth in my pride all these years. If that's lost, then let the rest be lost with it. There's certain things my vanity won't abide.

Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on - she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better - in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold.

A chain of follies had put him there: Call's abrupt decision to become a cattleman and his own decision, equally abrupt, to try and rescue a girl foolish enough to be taken in by Jake Spoon. None of it was sensible, yet he had to admit there was something about such follies that he liked.

Life ain't for sissies, as Augustus might have said.

Incompetents invariably made trouble for people other than themselves.

He didn't understand why women had such a need to question. He himself preferred just to let life happen, and act when opportunity arose.

It's my fault for not shooting the son of a bitch while he was drinking. I didn't know who he was at the time, but I should have shot him on suspicion. And then I plumb forgot about it all day. I'm getting too foolish to live.

You should marry me", he said. "I will be good to you. I am not like these men. I have manners. You would see how kind I would be. I would never leave you. You could have an easy life.

This is a damn useless conversation. Goodbye. (Charles Goodnight to Woodrow Call)

It was often that way with women, it seemed. One minute Lorie would be drilling holes in him with her eyes, and the next minute she and Clarie would be combing one another's hair and singing tunes.

He was tired of seeing his family only in dreams.

Buffalo Hump knew his son was brave, but that was not enough. If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.

Pussyfooting is a vice I have been concerned to avoid.

If he didn't like the way she did things, he was free to do them different - but he never did them different. He just fussed at her.

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters

Alone. "A military unit is a fine thing when it works," he said. "But it usually don't work. A solitary feat of arms is better, if the foe is worthy.

A sleeping man would miss the best of the evening, and the moonrise as well.

She had always loved to tease and considered it an irony of her life that she was often drawn to men who didn't recognize teasing even when she was inflicting it on them.

Po Campo had given him a hailstone dipped in molasses and he sat licking it and feeling alternately happy and sad while the men got dressed and prepared to be cowboys again.

I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice ... You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day
that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.

It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.

You have to remember that I've been lonely for a long time. Loneliness is like ice. After you've been lonely long enough you don't realize you're cold, but you are... I don't know, maybe at the center of me there's some ice that never will melt, maybe it's just been there too long. But you mustn't worry. You didn't put it there.

One day Augustus asked Newt to ride along with him, much to Newt's surprise. In the morning they saw a grizzly, but the bear was far upwind and didn't scent them. It was a beautiful day - no clouds in the sky. Augustus rode with his big rifle propped across the saddle - he was in the highest of spirits. They rode ahead of the herd some fifteen miles or more, and yet when they stopped to look back they could still see the cattle, tiny black dots in the middle of the plain, with the southern horizon still far behind them.

You don't look strong enough to trouble nobody around here ... We grow our own troubles
it would be a novelty to have some we ain't already used to.

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriends - and he accepts it.

They sorry," Deets said. "Saying won't change it. He's gone, don't worry about him. He's gone to the peaceful place." He put his hand

Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.

In the vastness of the desert, each reduction of the group made them realize how small they were, how puny, in relation to the space they were traveling through.

Captain McCrae was wanting to know the answer to questions that had no answer.

Call had never thought much about age. Charlie Goodnight liked to talk about it, but Call found the talk tedious. He was as old as he was, like everyone else; as long as he could still go when he needed to go, age didn't matter much. He was still able, within reason, to do what he had a mind to do. But he'd had a mind to kill the large doe, and he hadn't. Of course, he wasn't an exceptional shot. He had missed mule deer before, but the fact that he had missed this one just when he had, was troubling. They were just coming into the home country of the young bandit, a boy with a keen eye and a German rifle with a telescope sight. Getting a knuckle stuck in a trigger guard would not be wise, in a contest with Joey Garza.

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.

The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings
crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few.

Dish said no more, and Augustus decided not to tease him. Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity- they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour. Young Dish, skilled cowhand that he was, might not live to see the whores of Ogallala, and the tender feelings he harbored for Lorena might be the sweetest he would ever have.

Self-parody is the first portent of age.

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

I just got gang-egged, or egg-banged or something.
Sheriff Toots Burns.

We mostly quarreled. He wanted what I wouldn't give. I wanted what he didn't have.

He knew what he could certainly do, and what he might do if he was lucky, and what he couldn't do barring a miracle.