Quotes from Streets of Laredo

Larry McMurtry ·  547 pages

Rating: (10.3K votes)


“Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Streets of Laredo


“This is a damn useless conversation. Goodbye. (Charles Goodnight to Woodrow Call)”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Streets of Laredo


“She didn’t know what to do with the severed leg. She had cut it off, but she didn’t want to touch it or even look at it.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Streets of Laredo


“Not too many men, in his experience, had achieved a great thing, even one. Very few ever achieved more than one, he knew.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Streets of Laredo


“Still, he was a salaried man. Even though Katie, who had been a good wife, was dead, he was not his own master.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Streets of Laredo



“He was just a husband and a salaried man. Choice didn’t play any part in his life.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Streets of Laredo


“There was no degree of competence that would assure anyone of survival, and no scale that would tell a commander which man would live and which man would die.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Streets of Laredo


“It seemed to him the highest principle, loyalty. He preferred it to honor. He had never been exactly sure what men meant when they spoke of their honor, though it had been a popular word during the time of the War. He was sure, though, what he meant when he spoke of loyalty. A man didn’t desert his comrades, his troop, his leader. If he did he was, in Call’s book, worthless.”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Streets of Laredo


About the author

Larry McMurtry
Born place: in Wichita Falls, Texas, The United States
Born date June 3, 1936
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