Quotes from Charles Portis

You must pay for everything in this world, one way or another. There is nothing free except the grace of God.

When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous. I

He said, "You are lucky to be traveling in a place where a spring is so handy. In my country you can ride for days and see no ground water. I have lapped filthy water from a hoofprint and was glad to have it. You don't know what discomfort is until you have nearly perished for water." Rooster said, "If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar.

You're afraid of smart women, aren't you?' She had used this ploy before, having heard via the female bush telegraph that it was unanswerable. She was right though. I was leery of them. Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were both amusing for a while but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator.

I don't think about you at all when your mouth is closed.

There is nothing free except the Grace of God.

They later moved to a tin-roof house that was situated in a gas field under a spectacular flare that burned all the time. Big copper-green beetles the size of mice came from all over the Southland to see it and die in it. At night their corpses pankled down on the tin roof.

I will own I was somewhat afraid of them although they were not, as you may imagine, wild Comanches with painted faces and outlandish garb but rather civilized Creeks and Cherokees and Choctaws from Mississippi and Alabama who had owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy and wore store clothes. Neither were they sullen and grave. I thought them on the cheerful side as they nodded and spoke greetings.

She gave me a pledge card, a card promising an annual gift of $5, $10, or $25 toward the support of the Unity mission. I filled it out under the hot light of the projector. The name and address spaces were much too short, unless you wrote a very fine hand or unless your name was Ed Poe and you lived at 1 Elm St.

I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious "claptrap." My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33. Stonehill

You cannot carry water on both shoulders.

I'll go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces?

Lucille Biggers Langford and Florence Mabry Whiteside. As the

I'm white and I don't dance, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.

One of the favorite speakers was a man in red who warned of sickle-cell anemia, 'a deadly organism lurking in all nigger blood.' 'If so much as one drop of nigger blood gets in your baby's cereal,' he said, 'the baby will surely die in one year.' He did not explain how he thought a negro would come to bleed in anyone's cereal.

Who all is in there? Speak up and be quick about it!' 'A Methodist and a son a bitch!

Nature tells us to rest after meals and people who are too busy to heed that inner voice are often dead at the age of fifty years.

You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck.

I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces?

In a very few minutes this torture was mercifully ended. Blackie fell to the ground and died, his brave heart burst and mine broken. There never lived a nobler pony.

What is your work in this world?" "I don't know what it is yet. I'm back in school now." "It's getting pretty late in the day for you to have so few interests and convictions. How old are you, Mr. Midge?

An earlier plan to marry again had collapsed when her fiancé was killed in a motorcycle accident. His name was Don and he had taught oriental methods of self-defense in a martial arts academy. "They called it an accident," she said, "but I think the government had him killed because he knew too much about flying saucers.

A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can't quite achieve escape velocity.

Now I was surprised and light-headed, like a domestic fowl that finds itself able to fly over a low fence in a moment of terror.