Larry McMurtry Quotes

Great readers (are) those who know early that there is never going to be time to read all there is to read, but do their darnedest anyway.

It's just that it's fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.

It was something, what must go through men's mind where women were concerned, to cause them to behave so strangely.

Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked.

Buffalo Hump knew his son was brave, but that was not enough. If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.

Could any woman live every day with that level of masculinity?

Getting up early and feeling awake was the one skill he had never truly perfected - he got up, of course, but it never felt natural.

Of all the women he knew, she had meant the most; and was the one person in his life he felt he had missed, in some ways.

Once started, love couldn't easily be stopped.

But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son.

Little by little, the look of the land changes by the men we admire.

You probably drink too much. If you hand me that bottle, I'll reduce your temptations. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae