Doc Holliday Quotes

At the risk of descending to unscientific generalizations, 90 percent of Texans give the other 10 percent a bad name." - Attributed to John H. "Doc" Holliday

There's no normal life Wyatt, It's just life. Get on with it.

War's a funny thing. Some men go off and come home again just fine. But there's some that come home and never do come back.

He did not believe in luck at all, good or bad. Gamblers believed in luck, and he was not a gambler. Never had been, never would be. John Henry Holliday believed in mathematics, in statistics, in the computation of odds. Fifty-two cards in a deck. Make it easy. Say it's fifty. Any card has a 2 percent chance of being dealt from a full deck. Keep track of what's out. Adjust the probabilities as the hand progresses.

All the rantings in the world couldn't put the fear of the Lord into him like a few gentle words from his mother.

But as they stared into "The Star Spangled Banner," the music was blessedly drowned out by the squeal and moan of the barking train, iron on iron, a truer anthem of America.

The trains roared in on iron rails, bringing people from places he had never seen, taking them away to places he had only heard about. To him, the railroad was a romance and an adventure, and now it would be his turn to travel off into the unknown.

On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, the Earps were incorruptible, intrepid lawmen bravely marching off to protect the city from gun-toting outlaws. The next morning, they were cold-blooded killers who’d murdered three men on a public street because of some kind of personal feud between Doc Holliday and Ike Clanton.

There were days when his adventurous streak got the better of him and made him throw caution to the wind and commit some ungentlemanly act or another. Then Alice Jane would reprimand him and call him to repentance, her sweet voice tinged with the suffering of a loving parent: "John Henry, dearest, I am so very disappointed.

If you’re looking for a thief, bet on the man who’s always accusing his neighbors.

It didn’t occur to him to think that better is not the same as well. Was he fooling himself? He would not have said so. Even at twenty-two, when his diagnosis was confirmed, he was realistic. Most suffer. Everyone dies. He knew how, if not when. Now more than ever, he was determined to cheat the Fates of entertainment, but naturally, his time would come. When it did, he believed he would accept death as Socrates had: with cool philosophical distance. He would say something funny, or profound, or loving. Then he would let life fall gracefully from his hands. Horseshit, as James Earp would say, of the highest order. The truth is this. On the morning of August 14, 1878, Doc Holliday believed in his own death exactly as you do—today, at this very moment. He knew that he was mortal, just as you do. Of course, you know you’ll die someday, but … not quite the same way you know that the sun will rise tomorrow or that dropped objects fall. The great bitch-goddess Hope sees to that. Sit in a physician’s office. Listen to a diagnosis as bad as Doc’s. Beyond the first few words, you won’t hear a thing. The voice of Hope is soft but impossible to ignore. This isn’t happening, she assures you. There’s been a mix-up with the tests. Hope swears, You’re different. You matter. She whispers, Miracles happen. She says, often quite reasonably, New treatments are being developed all the time! She promises, You’ll beat the odds. A hundred to one? A thousand to one? A million to one? Eight to five, Hope lies. Odds are, when your time comes, you won’t even ask, “For or against?” You’ll swing up on that horse, and ride.

Reputation was everything in the Old South. The opinion of others was a measure of inner worth. Virtue, honor, valor, and respect simply did not exist apart from the view of a man in the minds of other men.

Alice was pretty enough and played piano well, but she was educated in excess of a lady’s requirements. She was also possessed of a quiet, stubborn strength of character that had discouraged beaux less determined than Henry Holliday, a Georgia planter ten years her senior.

John Henry Holliday believed in science, in rationality, and in free will. He believed in study, in the methodical acquisition and accumulation of useful skills. He believed that he could homestead his future with planning and preparation: sending scouts ahead and settling it with pioneering effort. Above all, he believed in practice, which increased predictability and reduced the element of chance in any situation. The very word made him feel calm. Piano practice. Dental practice. Pistol practice, poker practice. Practice was power. Practice was authority over his own destiny. Luck? That was what fools called ignorance and laziness and despair when they gave themselves up to the turn of a card, and lost, and lost, and lost …

And in the cool evenings after his mother had gone to bed, he learned to play a friendly game of cards, bluffing without blinking, and besting his father so many times that Henry said he was glad he hadn't taught the boy to wager so well. Those were happy times for John Henry, with his father's time and attention, the sun on his skin, the wind in his face, and a wild new world to explore.

The little girl he loved was gone and in her place stood a stranger with Mattie's eyes and a woman's body, her long auburn hair pulled up from her neck, her small shoulders squared against the world...She didn't see the blush rise up in his face when he spoke his name. She didn't hear his young voice crack when he stammered an answer to her questions. And she didn't know that, for the first time in his life, John Henry Holliday was falling in love.

Every so often, the gods stop laughing long enough to do something terrible. There are few facts that are not brutal. The bitter, insufficient truth is that God recovered, but fun is dead. Alcohol: the antidote to civilization. Alcoholism is a fatal disease. But then I am not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, because I don't want to be cured. Alcoholism is suicide with training wheels. I watch myself sinking, an inch at a time, and I spit into the eye of fate, like Doc Holliday, who died too weak to lift a playing card. My traitorous and degenerate attitude is sort of my book review of the world we live in. I resign from the human race. I declare myself null and void; folded, spindled, and mutilated. . . .This bar is an oasis for the night people, the street people, the invisible tribe, the people who simply do not exist in the orderly world we see in Time - the weekly science fiction magazine published by the Pentagon - an orderly world which is a sanitized Emerald City populated by contented Munchkins who pay taxes to buy tanks, nerve gas, and bombers and not a world which is a bus-station toilet where the air is a chemical cocktail of cancer-causing agents, children are starving, and the daily agenda is kill or be killed. When the world demands that you be larger than life, and you are finding it hard enough just being life-size, you can come here, in the messy hemorrhaging of reality, let your hair down, take your girdle off, and not be embarrassed by your wounds and deformities. Here among the terminally disenchanted you are graded not by the size of the car on display in your driveway but by the size of your courage in the face of nameless things. . . .Half of these people look like they just came back from the moon, and all of them are sworn witnesses for the prosecution on the charge that Earth serves as Hell for some other planet.

By the time Doc Holliday rode into Tombstone in 1880, the town already had an estimated 110 saloons, 14 gambling halls, a plentiful number of brothels, and 1 bowling alley.

It was disagreeable duty at best, taking men from their fields, women from the hearth, and children from play to push them at gunpoint to relocation centers,

I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.

Keep writing. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Put some words on paper. You never know what will happen.

But, Jesus, Tommy, what do you expect me to say? I grew up with you. When we were kids your fly was open more often than the twenty-four-hour laundromat. If your dick had been a gun you could have outdrawn Doc Holliday.

Jim, remember the movie Tombstone? Remember what Doc Holliday says to Wyatt Earp when Doc is dying. You and I saw that movie together, remember? Doc says to Wyatt: ‘There’s no such thing as normal life, Wyatt. There’s just life.

my soul longs for quiet; take me home.

This is why I hate you." "That can't be true," Doc said sadly. "What about the friendship bracelet you gave me?" Jury's eyelid twitched. "It's a protection bracelet." "No, that can't be right," Doc argued. "Look." He held his wrist out next to Jury's. "They match." Red was creeping up Jury's cheeks now. "They are protection bracelets," he insisted again. "And if you're not careful, I'll take it away.

And so they lose the right of basic human decency?" "It was... The idea... It was for the good of all," Thaddeus offered weakly. "The one is part of the all," Doc retorted. "If you strip away the good of the one, you can no longer claim to care for the good of all.

Honor is such a changeable word. Like morals and good. Everyone has their own definition.