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
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people—the young and the old—a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self. *   *   *”
― Atul Gawande, quote from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End


“Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay


“After Khodorkovsky was found guilty, most of Russia’s oligarchs went one by one to Putin and said, ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, what can I do to make sure I won’t end up sitting in a cage?’ I wasn’t there, so I’m only speculating, but I imagine Putin’s response was something like this: ‘Fifty per cent.”
― Bill Browder, quote from Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice


“Queen Mirabella stands at the altar of the Goddess. Sweating, but not from heat. Elementals are not bothered much by temperature, and if they were, no one inside could complain of being warm.”
― Kendare Blake, quote from Three Dark Crowns


“Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”
― quote from Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE


Interesting books

The Physician
(29K)
The Physician
by Noah Gordon
The New York Trilogy
(46.5K)
The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster
Women
(49.7K)
Women
by Charles Bukowski
Nevermore
(26.3K)
Nevermore
by Kelly Creagh
Kindred
(56.2K)
Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
The Rise of Nine
(83.8K)
The Rise of Nine
by Pittacus Lore

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.