Quotes from Charles Portis

The People's' historic duty was to become a nameless herd and submit to the absolute control of a small pack of wily and vicious intellectuals.

A less sensitive horse was found to serve.

I robbed one of them little high-interest banks there. Thought I was doing a good service. You can't rob a thief, can you? I never robbed no citizens. I never taken a man's watch." "It is all stealing," said I. "That was the position they taken in New Mexico," said he.

Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners.

Fogelson abused us like a stepfather.

Being a facetious person I got no credit for any depth of feeling.

Little did Papa realize that morning that he was never to see us or hold us again, nor would he ever again harken to the meadowlarks of Yell County trilling a joyous anthem to spring.

As we rode along LaBoeuf commenced whistling tunes, perhaps to take his mind off his sore arm. Rooster said, "God damn a man that whistles!" It was the wrong thing to say if he wished it to stop.

Yes, but that was the way she wanted to do it. And furthermore she didn't want him going out there with her now. Three exclamation marks appeared over Norwood's head. No, her mind was made up.

Get crossways of me, LaBoeuf, and you will think a thousand brick has fell on you.

I like chickens," said Norwood. "You can go in a chicken house at night and they're all sitting there on them poles facing the front like they was riding an elevator.

Mrs. Whichcoat came in the back door with an empty wire basket. She hung it up in the pantry and took off her brown garden gloves. "All the hens have stopped laying," she said. "I didn't get one egg." There was a note of despair in her voice but no surprise. It was as though she had warned all along that there would be treachery one day in the hen house.

I tried not to show much interest in his story after the way he had dozed while I was telling mine. It didn't matter, because he paid no attention to other people anyway. He spoke conversational English to all the Mexicans along the way and never seemed to notice that they couldn't understand a word he said.

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.

I remember once I rode a mean goat through a plum thicket on a dare.

Watch it now. You're taking liberties. Don't make things any worse than they are. Don't let your mouth write a check that your ass can't cash, son.

The news came like a thunderclap.

This is the real article. It is double-rectified busthead from Madison County, aged in the keg. A little spoonful would do you a power of good.' 'I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.' 'Oh, you wouldn't, would you?' 'No, I wouldn't.

I ordered a glass of beer and arranged my coins before me on the bar in columns according to value. 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 drank from the side of the mug that a left-handed person would use, in the belief that fewer mouths had been on that side.

To the best of my knowledge he had never even voted, and then someone must have told him something about politics, some convincing lie, or he read something—it's usually one or the other—and he stopped being funny and turned mean and silent. That wasn't so bad, but then he stopped being silent.

Then there was a disturbance in the kitchen and he went to investigate. When he came back, he said, "It was nothing, the mop caught fire. All my employees are fools.

It was a Temple that could be hauled away in the night by anyone with a two-inch ball on his car bumper

In a short time he came to like the rum, to prefer it, to demand it. The cheaper and rawer it was, the better he liked it. He reflected on this quirk of human nature and told June Mack, the barmaid, that it was one of God's most merciful blessings that people grew to love the things that necessity compelled them to eat and drink.

She took him by the ears and blew into his nostrils to give him a start, then looked into his eyes to see what she had surprised there.