“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
“When he stepped into the shower, the hot water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from The Club Dumas
“Hush," he murmured. "There now. Hush." He traced his finger along her jaw. "That is a sweet thought," he whispered. "Except, my lady, I cannot die.”
― Heather Dixon, quote from Entwined
“She didn't understand that. "How can anyone be afraid of love?"
"How can they not?" His face was completely aghast. "When you love someone... truly love them, friend or lover, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt—you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it's crippling—like having your heart carved out. It leaves you naked and exposed, wondering what you did to make them want to hurt you so badly when all you did was love them. What is so wrong with you that no one can keep faith with you? That no one can love you? To have it happen once is bad enough... but to have it repeated? Who in their right mind would not be terrified of that?”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Devil May Cry
“Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand
“I knew him the least well, understood him scarcely at all, felt uneasy in his presence, and yet perhaps in a strange way loved him more deeply than any.”
― Susan Hill, quote from The Woman in Black
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