Quotes from Glendon Swarthout

I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, I won't be laid-a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same of them.

The weather wouldn't settle down. It would rain cats and dogs, then stop, then drip awhile, then stop while it made up its mind what to do next.

You shut your door to these poor women," he said so they could hear him, "and you'll answer for it the rest of your lives. You won't sleep. You'll choke on drinks. The food you eat'll block up your bowels and you'll die of your own shit.

Like blind boys they found each other, and confirmed each other, and through the FM of the flesh they sent to one another impulses of courage and affection.

Tears were a women's guns, to be shed when no other weapon would work.

It was as though the great black bird which had all the night nested the egg of the earth lifted its wings and let light under and then with gigantic thrust of pinion flew upwards and it was day.

I did not know death then, that he is no more to be feared than the man on the black horse. He can be kind, time teaches us. He will lend a hand. Grace is his comrade, memory his foe. In the end he prevails, but triumphs not, so long as we remember.

If others fell by the wayside, dear women and strong, loved by men, how had she, single and unloved, kept her sanity?

Everybody has laws he lives by, I expect. I have mine as well." "What laws?" Bond Rogers was dismayed. Yet she waited, evidently as curious as her son. "I will not be laid a hand on. I will not be wronged. I will not stand for an insult. I don't do these things to others. I require the same from them.

He had not been in El Paso for years, and they had developed it considerably since then, he'd heard, along the lines of sin and salvation. They had churches and a Republican or two and a smart of banks and a symphony orchestra and five railroads and a lumberyard and the makings of a library. So much for sin. On the side of salvation they had ninety-some saloons, just shy of one for every hundred citizens, although municipal goodyism had moved the gambling rooms out back or upstairs.

She looked at him bravely now for the first time, at his face, the face from which a child had fled, and drew breath. She rose. Her eyes filled. She knew. He took her in his arms and kissed her ardently. Men in their hosts, young and old, innocent and corrupt, had paid her for her favors, but she put her arms about him of her own free will as though to give him what she could in recompense for this, the last gift she guessed, of his manhood.

She'd give him time, then logic. Men's minds were like wooden axles. Now and then they needed grease.

TV," I said, "do you believe in God?" "I believe," he said, "in Walt Disney." "You too!" We had clicked.

Ask the way to the Ladies Room and you're "processed." Freedom of choice, my backside.

Plus I think it would be good for men to know they have limits.

I would bet the most perfect peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich ever assembled that there are more well-adjusted people around today than people who aren't and I think it is damn tragic more of us do not appear in books. 3 symbiosis, n.