“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
“The affliction was too insipid, too much a product of our surrendering mindful regard and diligence. The meanings of words lost their precision – and no-one bothered taking to task those who cynically abused those words to serve their own ambitions, their own evasion of personal responsibility. Lies went unchallenged, lawful pursuit became a sham, vulnerable to graft, and justice itself became a commodity, mutable in imbalance. Truth was lost, a chimera reshaped to match agenda, prejudices, thus consigning the entire political process to a mummer’s charade of false indignation, hypocritical posturing and a pervasive contempt for the commonry.”
― Steven Erikson, quote from Reaper's Gale
“If you want to see a man come to his senses, try something like, Do you happen to carry a rubber in your wallet? Did I mention I'm not on the pill?”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Pay It Forward
“I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it.”
― Pascal Mercier, quote from Night Train to Lisbon
“Everybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that's why you'll never hear any reggae on the radio!”
― Daniel Clowes, quote from Ghost World
“Stop your doubting, my love. I knew you would find me. ~Jack”
― Melissa de la Cruz, quote from Misguided Angel
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.
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