Quotes from Lonesome Dove

“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.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“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”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“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.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. 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.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn't remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation.
"I hate a man that talks rude," he said. "I won't tolerate it.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“It's like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“I never met a soul in this world as normal as me.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“If I had a mind to rent pigs, I'd be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won't be stopped.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“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.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.
It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. The the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dirt dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air.
It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“My main skills are talking and cooking biscuits,' Augustus said. 'And getting drunk on the porch.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“A man who wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“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.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“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?”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“I figured out something, Lorie,” he said. “I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match, as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“Who asked them dern pigs?” he said. “I guess they tracked us,” Augustus said. “They’re enterprising pigs.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“They don't know it, but the wrath of the Lord is about to descend upon them.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“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.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

“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.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Lonesome Dove

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Popular quotes

“We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even...Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.”
― Victor J. Stenger, quote from God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

“I like that kind of thing. I like warmth and uncalled-for kindness, the small unnoticed generosities that speckle the meanness of the world.”
― Roland Merullo, quote from A Little Love Story

“All those years were now seeming like a betrayal of what she really was. While her body, her needs, her emotions–all of herself–had been turning like a sunflower after one man, all that time she had been holding in her hands something else, the something precious, offering it in vain to her husband, to her children, to everyone she knew–but it had never been taken, had not been noticed. But this thing she had offered, without knowing she was doing it, which had been ignored by herself and by everyone else, was what was real in her.” (page 140)”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Summer Before the Dark

“Ishmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. “This is very important to you, this box.”
“It’s important to the world.”

Ishmael said: “The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die.” He shrugged.

He would never understand, Wolff thought; but others would.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Key to Rebecca

“They needed each other.
Two lost souls, he thought, taking a moment to walk to the tall windows that looked out on part of the world he’d built for himself out of will, desire, sweat, and dubiously accumulated funds. Two lost souls whose miserable beginnings had forged them into what appeared to be polar opposites.
Love had narrowed the distance, then had all but eradicated it.
She’d saved him. The night his life had hung in her furious and unbreakable grip. She’d saved him, he mused, the first moment he’d locked eyes with her. As impossible as it should have been, she was his answer. He was hers.
He had a need to give her things. The tangible things wealth could command. Though he knew the gifts most often puzzled and flustered her. Maybe because they did, he corrected with a grin. But underlying that overt giving was the fierce foundation to give her comfort, security, trust, love. All the things they’d both lived without most of their lives.
He wondered that a woman who was so skilled in observation, in studying the human condition, couldn’t see that what he felt for her was often as baffling and as frightening to him as it was to her.
Nothing had been the same for him since she’d walked into his life wearing an ugly suit and cool-eyed suspicion. He thanked God for it.
Feeling sentimental, he realized. He supposed it was the Irish that popped out of him at unexpected moments.”
― J.D. Robb, quote from Witness in Death

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