West Texas Quotes

I went to West Texas and started writing a cycle of Americana poems after the space conjured images that, as a child, I only saw on television-John Wayne, cowboys, borderlines. But suddenly, I felt close to these once-foreign imageries and wondered how I'd changed. Each evening brought the darkest skies in the country, and I understood the expansiveness of our inner selves. Ultimately nothing divides us except the worlds and words we allow. ~ Nathalie Handal

As a child of West Texas, I identify with Hispanic culture every bit as much as I do North American culture. ~ Tommy Lee Jones

I get around OK with a toolbox. As a kid, I picked up skills following my dad through the oil fields of Oklahoma and West Texas. My wife Janine is hard to impress, but she does think it's cool when I fix things around the house. ~ Ronnie Dunn

There are so few other things we can look at with pride,' said Allen. 'We don't have a large university that has thirty or forty thousand students in it. We don't have the art museum that some communities have and are world-renowned. When somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football. There is nothing to replace it. It's an integral part of what made the community strong. You take it away and it's almost like you strip the identity of the people. ~ H. G. Bissinger

When he stood trembling with fear before the captor, bruised from falls by the restrictive rope, made submissive by choking, clogs, cuts and starvation, he had lost what made him so beautiful and free ... One out of every three mustangs captured in south west Texas was expected to die before they were tamed. The process often broke the spirits of the other two. ~ J. Frank Dobie

When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries. ~ Jenny Lawson

I know you're afraid of getting hurt, again," Rick said as he gently took Angela's hands in his. "I can't predict your future. I'm just asking you if I can be a part of it. ~ Josephine Harwood

He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I feel very at home in L.A., I think, because it's dry, and there's sun, like the West Texas I grew up in. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

Son, not everbody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven. ~ Cormac McCarthy

In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse. ~ Marc Reisner

I call wild niggas together like Cyrus,
And knock off more birds than the West Nile Virus. ~ Bumpy Knuckles

Of course 'Hamlet' is a debate about the nature and morality of revenge and whether it is right to do something to assuage your angry feelings. ~ Samuel West

I'm not an overnight sensation. I'm a Texan. And I'm a Texas success story. I am the epitome of hard work and optimism. ~ Wendy Davis

There is something glorious about this place we call Texas. Hell, I don't know, it must be in the water. Somehow, as overwhelming odds and pressures congregate over Texas like a spring storm, average men and women are transformed into icons of history. ~ David Thomas Roberts

Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause. ~ Douglas Adams

Public grazing provides just one dollar out of every $2,500 of taxable income in the West, or 0.04 percent, and just one out of everything 1,400 jobs, or 0.07 percent. On both public and private lands in the eleven Western states, the livestock industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all income. ~ Christopher Ketcham

We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting. ~ Martin Jacques

I was living under a desk in West Hollywood. It was a closet that I shared with another comic. I was shocked when they called me to come in to try out for the show. The chances of me getting on a TV show and winning it is like one-in-a-million. I had only been doing comedy for six years at that point, so I was basically considered an open mic-er or maybe a feature act once in awhile. ~ Dat Phan

When western books are set in the present, critics seldom call them westerns: the national myth allows the West only a past. ~ Gerald W. Haslam

If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth. ~ Patti Smith

The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does. ~ Douglas Coupland

Cars, toys, aspirin, meat, toasters, water - nearly every product sold has passed basic safety regulations well in advance of being marketed and sold. But consumer credit is a kind of buyer-beware, wild west. That is partly the result of history. ~ Elizabeth Warren

People think I'm girlish and flippant, but I was an honours student. I was voted Girl Most Likely To Succeed at North Mesquite High in Texas. My best subject was science. I won a scholarship. ~ Jerry Hall

The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his head sadly about it all. He said, "It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?"
I couldn't help myself...I blurted out, "But it *is* about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam."
Ruud said, "Ayaan, of course these people may have been Muslims, but they are a lunatic fringe. We have extremist Christians, too, who interpret the bible literally. Most Muslims do not believe these things. To say so is to disparage a faith which is the second largest religion in the world, and which is civilized, and peaceful."
I walked into the office thinking, "I have to wake these people up."...The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn't been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Music is part of human life and partakes of the human tragedy. There is much more music in the world than is allowed to change into heard sounds and prove its point. ~ Rebecca West

It's hard to impress somebody who's already the best at everything you try. ~ Jacqueline West

We culture. Rap is the new rock 'n roll. We the rockstars. It's been like that for a minute, Hedi Slimane! ~ Kanye West

Damen Trent pushed his fat fingers between the blinds, peering across the street. Sure enough, all the windows of the Mekinet News building were in darkness. ~ Peter James West

The belief that they were special, that they had the stones to endure what others couldn't, was the most quintessentially Texas thing about them. It was an arrogance born of genuine fortitude and a streak of hardheadness six generations deep, a Homeric shield against the petty jealousies and lethal injustices that so occupied white folks' free time, their oppressive and intrusive gaze into every aspect of black life - from what you eat to who you marry to the clothes you wear to the music you play to the way you wear your hair to how you address them on the street. The Mathews family recognized it for what it was: a fevered obsession that didn't really have anything to do with them, a preoccupation that weakened a man looking anywhere but at himself. ~ Attica Locke

It's hard to keep track when you're looking into so many, isn't it? ~ Kasie West

I say no to people who prioritize being cool over being good. I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet. It's a way of kicking down the boundaries that society has set up for women - be compliant, be a caregiver, be quiet - and erecting my own. I will do this; I will not do that. You believe in my subjugation; I don't have to be nice to you. I am busy. My time is not a public commodity. ~ Lindy West

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind. ~ Rebecca West

Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran, no matter how benign their intentions, present a condescending view not just of the religion but also of women living in Muslim majority countries, as if the desire for choice and happiness is the monopoly of women in the west. ~ Azar Nafisi

The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them. ~ Kathleen Norris

As I sailed into Shadow, a white bird of my desire came and sat upon my right shoulder, and I wrote a note and tied it to its leg and set it on its way. The note said "I am coming," and it was signed by me.
A black bird of my desire came and sat upon my left shoulder, and I wrote a note and tied it to its leg and sent it off into the west. It said, "Eric- I'll be back," and it was signed: Corwin, Lord of Amber.
A demon wind propelled me east of the sun. ~ Roger Zelazny

Are we witnessing an Obama 'Wag the Dog' moment with Boko Haram in Nigeria? I say yes. Consider all the scandals facing the Obama administration, especially Benghazi and the Select Committee. ~ Allen West

Some goin' east; and-a some goin' west,
Some stand aside to try their best.
Some livin' big, but the most is livin' small.
They just can't even find no food at all. ~ Peter Tosh

I thought justice ground real slow in Texas." "Only if you plead not guilty. ~ Lee Child

A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking; but even a solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it. ~ Vita Sackville-West

After the Grand Perhaps"

After vespers, after the first snow
has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave,
after the anorexics have curled
into their geometric forms,
after the man with the apparition
in his one bad eye has done red things
behind the curtain of the lid & sleeps,
after the fallout shelter in the elementary school
has been packed with tins & other tangibles,
after the barn boys have woken, startled
by foxes & fire, warm in their hay, every part
of them blithe & smooth & touchable,
after the little vandals have tilted
toward the impossible seduction
to smash glass in the dark, getting away
with the most lethal pieces, leaving
the shards which travel most easily
through flesh as message
on the bathroom floor, the parking lots,
the irresistible debris of the neighbor's yard
where he's been constructing all winter long.
After the pain has become an old known
friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it.
The power of fright, I think, is as much
as magnetic heat or gravity.
After what is boundless: wind chimes,
fertile patches of the land,
the ochre symmetry of fields in fall,
the end of breath, the beginning
of shadow, the shadow of heat as it moves
the way the night heads west,
I take this road to arrive at its end
where the toll taker passes the night, reading.
I fee ~ Lucie Brock-Broido

Note to self: Caymen is very good at sarcasm."
"If you're recording notes for an official record, I'd like the word 'very' stricken and replaced with 'exceptionally. ~ Kasie West

Democracy is a hegemonic tool of the West and contrary to Islam. Why do you act as though the entire world needs democracy? And when it comes to homosexuality, the issue is clearly dealt with by the Koran. It says it is forbidden and should be punished. ~ Abdul Sattar Abu Risha

Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit. ~ Morris L. West

In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness. ~ Claudia Rankine

It may be too late for West Virginia to save itself from the ravages of Big Coal. But it's not too late for America. ~ Jeff Goodell

The gardens were mystifying, inside the beautifully tended box hedges the flower-beds were choked with weeds, a single garden chair, made of white painted wire in the Victorian fashion, was set quite alone on a wide gravel space, with an air of deluded sociability, as if it had gone mad and thought that there were about it many other garden chairs. ~ Rebecca West

That was like being a vegetarian in Texas. ~ Kimberly Loth

Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent. ~ Paul Farmer