Quotes from True Grit

“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“Nothing I like to do pays well.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“Lookin' back is a bad habit.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“If you want anything done right you will have to see to it yourself every time.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“But I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“I know what they said even if they would not say it to my face. People love to talk. They love to slander you if you have any substance.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“Time just gets away from us.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“There is no knowing what is in a man's heart.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“You do not think much of me, do you, Cogburn?"

"I don't think about you at all when your mouth is closed.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“The wicked flee when none pursueth.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“MR.GOUDY: I believe you testified that you backed away from Aaron Wharton.
MR.COGBURN: That is right.
MR.GOUDY: You were backing away?
MR.COGBURN: Yes sir. He had that ax raised.
MR.GOUDY: Which direction were you going?
MR.COGBURN: I always go backwards when I am backing up.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“We must each of us bear our own misfortunes.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“Who is the best marshal they have?'

The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'

I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“I had hated these ponies for the part they played in my father's death but now I realized the notion was fanciful, that it was wrong to charge blame to these pretty beasts who knew neither good nor evil but only innocence. I say that of these ponies. I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious "claptrap." My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“What have you done when you have bested a fool?”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“I bought some crackers and a piece of hoop cheese and an apple at a grocery store and sat on a nail keg by the stove and had a cheap yet nourishing lunch. You know what they say, "Enough is as good as a feast.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“That's bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“You are a pearl of great price to me, but there are times when you are an almighty trial to those who love you.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“Nothing is too long or too short either if you have a true and interesting tale and what I call a "graphic" writing style combined with educational aims.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“She said, 'Goodbye, Reuben, a love for decency does not abide in you.' There is your divorced woman talking about decency. I told her, I said, 'Goodbye, Nola, I hope that little nail selling bastard will make you happy this time.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife's religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need for some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“If you don't have no schooling you are up against it in this country, sis. That is the way of it. No sir, that man has no chance any more. No matter if he has got sand in his craw, others will push him aside, little thin fellows that have won spelling bees back home.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“It was still dark outside and bitter cold although mercifully there was little wind. Why is it calm in the early morning? You will notice that lakes are usually still and smooth before daybreak.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“I am ready. I have repented my sins and soon I will be in heaven with Christ my savior. Now I must die like a man.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“You go for a man hard and fast enough and he don't have time to think about how many is with him, he thinks about himself and how he may get clear out of the wrath that is about to set down on him.”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

“He drank even as he rode, which looked difficult. I cannot say it slowed him down any, but it did make him silly. Why do people wish to be silly?”
― Charles Portis, quote from True Grit

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Popular quotes

“Then Mal let out a loud wailing noise. “I hate it when mommy and daddy fight!”
― Kylie Scott, quote from Lead

“Ivo Andric, Bosnian chronicle (Quote about nostalgia, free translation from Bosnian lenguage)

More than three hundred years ago, brought us from our homeland, a unique Andalusia, a terrible, foolish, fratricidal whirlwind, which we can not understand even today, and who has not understood it to this day, scattered us all over the world and made us beggars to which gold does not help. Now, threw us on the East, and life on the East is not easy for us or blessed, and the as much man goes further and gets closer to the sun's birth, it is worse, because the land is younger and more raw and people are from the land. And our trouble is that we could not fully love this country, to which we owe becouse it has received us, accept us and provided us with shelter, nor could we hate the one who has unjustly took us away and expelled us as an unworthly sons. We do not know is it more difficult that we are here or that we are not there. Wherever we were outside of Spain, we would suffer because we would have two homelands, I know, but here life is too much pressed us and humiliated us. I know that we have been changed for a long time,we do not remember anymore how we were, but surely we remember that we were different. We left and road up long time ago and we traveled hard and we unluckily fell down and stopped at this place, and that is why we are no longer even a shadow of what we were. As a powder on a fruit that goes hand-to-hand, from man first fall of what is finest on him. That's why we are like this. But you know us, us and our life, if we can call this life. We live between "occupiers" and commonalty, miserable commonalty and terrible Turkish. Cutted away completely from our loved ones, we are careful to look after and keep everything Spanish, songs and meals and customs, but we feel that everything changes in us, spoils and forgets. We remember the language of our land, the lenguage we did take and carried three centuries ago, the lenguage which even do not speak there anymore, and we ridiculously speak with stumbling the language of the comonalty with which we suffer and the Turkish who rules over us. So it may not be a long day when we will be purely and humanly able to express ourselves only in prayer, and which actually does not need any words.
This so lonely and few, we marry between us and see that our blood is paling and fainting. We bend and shred in front of everyone, we mourn, suffer and contrive, as people said: on the ice we make campfire, we work, we gain, we save, not only for ourselves and for our children, but for all those who are stronger and more insolent, impudent than us and strike on our life , on the dignity, and on the wealth. So we preserved the faith for which we had to leave our beautiful country, but lost almost everything else. Luckily, and to our sorrow, we did not lose from our memory reminiscence of our dear country, as it was, before she drive away us like stepmother; just as it will never extinguish in us the desire for a better world, the world of order and humanity in which you goes stright, watches calmly and speaks openly. We can not free ourselves from that feeling, nor feeling that, in addition to everything, we belong to such a world, though, we are expelled and unhappy, otherwise we live. That's what we would like to know there. That our name does not die in that brighter and higher world that is constantly darkening and destroying, iconstantly moves and changes, but never collapses, and always for somebody exists, that that world knows that we are carrying him in our soul, that even here we serve him on our way, and we feel one with him, even though we are forever and hopelessly separated from him.”
― Ivo Andrić, quote from Bosnian Chronicle

“We should get these wet clothes off," I say conscious now of the cold.
A smile breaks over Colton's face. He raises an eyebrow. "Yeah?”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart

“I think I would rather just live my life,” Teddy said, “not make an artifice of it.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from A God in Ruins

“(the villa) It's beautiful too, all hot pinks and reds, and rocks and sand and blinding blue and white.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, quote from Colony

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