Quotes from Larry McMurtry

The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them.

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.

A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.

I'm sure partial to the evening,' Augustus said. 'The evening and the morning. If we just didn't have to have the rest of the dern day I'd be a lot happier.

Little by little, the look of the land changes by the men we admire.

I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call

Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

A man that ain't willin' to cheat for a poke don't want it bad enough.

Who asked them dern pigs?" he said. "I guess they tracked us," Augustus said. "They're enterprising pigs.

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.

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.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. —T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

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.

Incompetents invariably made trouble for people other than themselves.

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

Uva uvum vivendo varia fit

WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.

You know Deets is like me - he's not one to quit on a garment just because it's got a little age - spoken by Augustus McCrae

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.

Deets slapped his leg and laughed, the thought was so funny. When the rest of the outfit finally wondered down from the house they found the two of them grinning back and forth at one another. Look at 'em, Augustus said. You'd think they just discovered teeth.

Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked.

Life makes everybody strange, if you keep living long enough

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.

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one's youth.