Quotes from Walter Van Tilburg Clark

True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has developed with mankind ... If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?

Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones.

Then our crime's worse than a murderer's. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law.

Places, like people, have their beginnings and have also their endings.

We desire justice, and justice has never been obtained in haste and strong feeling.

He proved that it was equally true if the disregard was by a ruler or by a people. "It spreads like a disease," he said. "And it's infinitely more deadly when the law is disregarded by men pretending to act for justice than when it's simply inefficient, or even when its elected administrator's are crooked.

I'm slow with a new idea, and want to think it over alone, where I'm sure it's the idea and not the man that's getting me.

That hatred of the railroad was Winder's only original notion, and when he got mad that always came in some way. Everything else was what he'd heard somebody, or most everybody, say, only he always got angry enough to make it sound like a conviction.

Nothing imaginative ever happens to five people at once, because each is up to only one-fifth of his personal intelligence and perception. A crowd is never equal to the intelligence of any one of its members.

It is possible to insult Americans?" "They are automatically insulted and enraged," said the young composer. "They form splenetic organizations by the hundreds, and write letters to periodicals and congressmen. They gather in mobs and pay no attention. They hang people without trial and shoot citizens down with machine guns out of passing cars. They will despise you because you do not eat the same things they eat for breakfast. They even apply indifference.

I failed, he said, I got talking my ideas. It's my greatest failing.

She wasn't given to thinking very far, but she did a lot of intelligent feeling.

He had lost the bright gods, and he had not been accepted by the dark. He was in a no soul's land, and in its isolation his own soul was withdrawn, small and heavy as a stone within him, and about his evil deed. No wonder it could not take wing and make the heralding music. That was the whole of reality now, the little stone inside, and outside the cold, dark ravine and the inescapable watcher.

It followed that the powers of light and darkness were not wholly and always opposed to one another.

Helen, who was wild to be doing, and who had no patience for the limitation of words, or of thoughts, or even of the body, though she trusted the body most.

Just being is the main thing. Anything else is extra.

the north and south ends, there wasn't much to Bridger's Wells: Arthur Davies' general store, the land and mining claims office, Canby's saloon, the long, sagging Bridger Inn, with its double-decker porch, and the Union Church, square and bare as a New England meeting house, and set out on the west edge of town, as if it wanted to get as far from the other church as it could without being left alone.

Is it really so important to be different?

but you can feel awful guilty about nothing when the men you're with don't trust you.

Yet the great "Why?" always at the center of the little "whats" and "hows" that makes religions into mythologies is often stronger in dead temples than in living.

How you feeling now, fellow?" he asked. "Good," I said. "Take care of yourself," he said. "This still don't have to be our picnic." "It looks like it was," I said. "Yeah," he agreed, "but it ain't.

This snow will be three feet deep by morning," the first man said. There was a lot of muttering in agreement. After trying to see into the clearing all that time the job did look ridiculous. Also, unseasonable winter takes the heart out of men the same as it does out of animals. You just get used to the sun and the limber feeling, and when they go you want to crawl back into your hole.

a gentle, permanent reality that was in him like his bones or his heart, that made him seem like an everlasting part of things.

None of them were even married, and the kind of women they got a chance to know weren't likely to be changed by what a rustler would do to them.