If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.
It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae
If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
The older the violin, the sweeter the music.
Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.
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.
It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.
If I had a mind to rent pigs, I'd be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won't be stopped.
It's like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added
Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.
I never met a soul in this world as normal as me.
Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.
I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.
The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.
Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.
Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.
Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess.
But just let me tell you something, son, a woman's love is like the morning dew, it's just as apt to settle on a horse turd as it is on a rose. So you better just get over it.
I hate rude behavior in a man,' he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. 'I won't tolerate it.' He politely tipped his hat, and rode away.
From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.
The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them.
There isn't a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes.
The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters
A man who wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae
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.
Uva uvum vivendo varia fit
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.
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.
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
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.
They don't know it, but the wrath of the Lord is about to descend upon them.
Who asked them dern pigs?” he said. “I guess they tracked us,” Augustus said. “They’re enterprising pigs.
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.
I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call
You don't get the pint, Woodrow, I've walked the earth in my pride all these years. If that's lost, then let the rest be lost with it. There's certain things my vanity won't abide.
He knew what he could certainly do, and what he might do if he was lucky, and what he couldn’t do barring a miracle.
It was inconsiderate, she thought, how blandly people mentioned the future in the sick rooms. Phrases like next summer were always popping out; people made such assumptions about their own continuity.
My main skills are talking and cooking biscuits,' Augustus said. 'And getting drunk on the porch.
Monkey John looked at the dead boy. "By God, life is cheap up here on the goddamned Canadian River." "Cheap," Blue Duck answered. "And it might get cheaper.
Buffalo Hump knew his son was brave, but that was not enough. If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.
-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.
Incompetents invariably made trouble for people other than themselves.
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This is a damn useless conversation. Goodbye. (Charles Goodnight to Woodrow Call)
At times he felt that he had almost rather not be in love with her, for it brought him no peace. What was the use of it, if it was only going to be painful?
Razzy was insulting me silently somehow.
I sometimes think the sexual organs were put there to keep the human race humble," she said. "They've certainly kept me humble.
Little by little, the look of the land changes by the men we admire.
Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country."--Augustus McCrae
And it’s the only whorehouse in town. They say if you can sprout up twelve inches of dick you get to fuck free.
I just got gang-egged, or egg-banged or something." --Sheriff Toots Burns.
No half measures,” he muttered several times. It was his personal motto; he intended to have it latinised and put on a crest.
There would be a trial, of course. But I had watched a few trials in Thalia, and I had seen people a lot dumber than Hud get away with a lot worse than what he did.
Dern, I hate cooking with shit. -- Augustus McCrae to Lorena Wood
You ought to take more chances," I said. "I took too many earlier," she said. "I'm sorry.
Death and worse happened on the plains.
. . . he had learned in his years of tracking Indians that things which seemed impossible often weren't. They only became so if one thought about them too much so that fear took over.
The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.
I'd hate to read all these books...that much reading could put your eyes out.
It’s a fine world, though rich in hardships at times,” Augustus said.
In fact, July felt he had reached a point in his life where virtually nothing was known.
Talk's the way to kill it. Anything gets boring if you talk about it enough, even death.
There seem to be no way he could stop anything that was happening, although it all felt wrong.
Do you know what it means to be heartbroken?...It means your heart isn't whole, so you can't really do anything wholeheartedly.
Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.
I pride myself on being able to put up with a lot,” Nellie said. “But bagpipers are pretty much my limit.
Well, boys," Long Bill said. "I guess here's where I quit rangering. It's rare sport, but it ain't quite safe.
I don’t claim to know much: cards, fucking, and dentistry about covers it,” Doc said.
Jake, you’re a dern grasshopper,” Augustus said. “You ride in yesterday talking Montana, and today you’re talking California.
A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.
Figure the reason you don’t have much to say is you probably never met a man who liked to hear a woman talk.
Of all the women he knew, she had meant the most; and was the one person in his life he felt he had missed, in some ways.
Once started, love couldn't easily be stopped.
He loved the way she smelled in the mornings; he liked to sniff at her shoulders or her throat.
It's very peculiar, the situations life presents one with, Father Geoff reflected.
She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met a woman.
It seemed to him harder, as he got older, to find a simple way of life.
Nothing good ever comes without a price.
It doesn’t do to sacrifice for people unless they want you to,” Clara said. “It’s just a waste.
He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.
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.
The whole point of loyalty was not to change: stick with those who stuck with you.
He might die, but at least he could fight first, and not simply pass his days shaking at the expectation of slaughter.
Henpecked, the great Wyatt Earp,” Cody said. “You evidently don’t know Jessie,” Wyatt said. “If she’s in one of her tempers she’d put a hyena to flight ...
Such is the life and death of a good cowboy.
It’s his dern laziness,” Call said. “Jake just kind of drifts. Any wind can blow him.
You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.
People got opinions, that's all they've got.
His feet were swollen to twice their size, besides being cut here and there. Yet they were the only feet he had, and after dozing for an hour in the sun, he got up and hobbled on.
But then July accepted it and never scolded back, so perhaps that was the way of the world: women scolded, and men kept quiet and stayed out of the way as much as possible.
