Quotes from Larry McMurtry

Why would you want to keep in practice being wrong?" Call asked. "I'd think it would be something you'd try to avoid." "You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it," Augustus said. "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.

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.

It's his dern laziness," Call said. "Jake just kind of drifts. Any wind can blow him.

I miss Gus...I get to expecting to hear him talk and he ain't here. My ears sort of get empty.

But once in a while, even if nobody mentioned one, the thought of women entered his head all on its own, and once it came it usually tneded to stay for several hours, filling his noggin like a cloud of gnats. Of course, a cloud of gnats was nothing in comparison to a cloud of Gulf coast mosquitoes, so the thought of women was not that bothersome, but it was a thought Pea would rather not have in his head.

I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad.

He might die, but at least he could fight first, and not simply pass his days shaking at the expectation of slaughter.

I don't know anything about babies," he said. "No, and you've never lived any place but Arkansas," Clara said. "But you ain't stupid and you ain't nailed down. You can live other places and you can learn about children—people dumber than you learn about them.

I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.

Without realizing it, he had been wasting time—years and years of time, time that would never be his again. He had failed to take advantage of the diversity of opportunity that had been, all along, available to him.

The other men were easy to talk to, but they didn't know anything. If one stopped to think about it, it was depressing how little most men learned in their lifetimes.

Better by far never to have known the pleasure than to have the pain that followed.

Is the girl all right?" "She's had an ordeal but she's young," Augustus said. "She won't forget it, but she might outlive it.

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

Best to help such boys have their moment of fun, before life's torments snatched them.

She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met a woman.

It's funny, leaving a place, ain't it? he said. You never do know when you'll get back.

Earlier in his life he had done many foolish things in order to convince himself that he was not worthless

He loved the way she smelled in the mornings; he liked to sniff at her shoulders or her throat.

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

Many white men could not trust things unless they could be explained; and yet the most beautiful things, such as the trackless flight of birds, could never be explained.

Dern, I hate cooking with shit. -- Augustus McCrae to Lorena Wood

by far my most popular novel, and one that allows me to join the small company of "respectable" writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee and a handful of others

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