John Wayne Quotes

This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.

Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.

You're short on ears and long on mouth.

I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.

A man deserves a second chance, but keep an eye on him.

I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living.

Never apologize, mister, it’s a sign of weakness.

Talk low, Talk slow, and Don't say too much.

My hope and prayer is that everyone know and love our country for what she really is and what she stands for.

I've always followed my father's advice: he told me, first to always keep my word and, second, to never insult anybody unintentionally. If I insult you, you can be goddamn sure I intend to. And, third, he told me not to go around looking for trouble.

All battles are fought by scared men who'd rather be some place else.

Sassenach,” he said against my shoulder, a moment later. “Mm?” “Who in God’s name is John Wayne?” “You are,” I said. “Go to sleep.

A man's got to do what a man's got to do.

We’re burnin’ daylight.

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

It's getting to be ri-goddamn-diculous.

If you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.

Government has no wealth, and when a politician promises to give you something for nothing, he must first confiscate that wealth from you -- either by direct taxes, or by the cruelly indirect tax of inflation.

Thanking people is dangerous business. A name always slips your mind.

courage is being scared to death - and saddling up anyway" "A goal, A love and A dream give you total control over your body and your life

Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine will ever be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. "I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'" She was my friend after that.

COWBOYS, just like the word says.

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

I would like to be remembered, well ... the Mexicans have a phrase, "Feo fuerte y formal". Which means he was ugly, strong and had dignity.

Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.

see, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead. Otherwise you don’t have a hero. You can’t kill a hero. That’s why I never let him get older.

No cowboys for Canada. Canada got Mounties instead - Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne. It's a mind-set of "Here I come to save the day" versus "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

There are two types of people on planet Earth, Batman and Iron Man. Batman has a secret identity, right? So Bruce Wayne has to walk around every second of every day knowing that if somebody finds out his secret, his family is dead, his friends are dead, everyone he loves gets tortured to death by costumed supervillains. And he has to live with the weight of that secret every day. But not Tony Stark, he's open about who he is. He tells the world he's Iron Man, he doesn't give a shit. He doesn't have that shadow hanging over him, he doesn't have to spend energy building up those walls of lies around himself. You're one or the other - either you're one of those people who has to hide your real self because it would ruin you if it came out, because of your secret fetishes or addictions or crimes, or you're not one of those people. And the two groups aren't even living in the same universe.

The Duke [John Wayne] was a massive figure. He looked like a heavy piece of hauled lumber, and it didn't seem like any man could stand shoulder to shoulder with him.

Sassenach,” he said against my shoulder, a moment later. “Mm?" “Who in God’s name is John Wayne?” “You are,” I said. “Go to sleep.

Life it tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.

I've loved reading all my life.

The hyphenated American is ridiculous. But that’s what we have to put up with. I think that any person that’s in the United States is better off here than they would be where they came from.

Just one more question, Pilgrim. How far up your ass do you want my boot?

Seen better fights than this at a prayer meeting.

That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.

Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians.

If I was white I would have been like John Wayne... I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play

I would think somebody like Jane Fonda and her idiot husband would be terribly ashamed and saddened that they were a part of causing us to stop helping the South Vietnamese. Now look what’s happening. They’re getting killed by the millions. Murdered by the millions. How the hell can she and her husband sleep at night?

Cole turned his bride to hug her from behind, nuzzling her neck. -I'll have you in my bed next. I'm going to make love to you so thoroughly that, tomorrow? You'll walk like John Wayne.

The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology.

We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can't be a good person and say you wouldn't fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our side, and on our side so few died. (Our side meaning the lantern-jawed John Wayne Greatest Generation constantly canonized soldiers who strode in late to the graveyard that was Europe. Compared to Jewish, Russian, Roma, and other casualties, our losses were minimal.) We felt so strong. In some ways I think we're always trying to recapture that feeling of being a country of superheroes. With every war we invoke that one, we hope it will be that good. -from her blog

There's right and there's wrong. Y'gotta do one or the other. Do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.

Sassenach,” he said against my shoulder, a moment later. "Mm?” "Who in God’s name is John Wayne?” "You are,” I said. “Go to sleep. I really needed that laugh to break the tears.

Just because I look like John Wayne (at least my liver looks identical to his) doesn’t mean I play cowboy with politics. I’m going to vote for Philo T. Farnsworth for president, and so should you.

With few exceptions, black men, Middle Eastern men, and Hispanic men are not called to a wild, militant masculinity. Their aggression, by contrast, is seen as dangerous, a threat to the stability of home and nation.

All the screen cowboys behaved like real gentlemen. They didn't drink, they didn't smoke. When they knocked the bad guy down, they always stood with their fists up, waiting for the heavy to get back on his feet. I decided I was going to drag the bad guy to his feet and keep hitting him.

The worst part of it has been, I think, the adverse effect on family life. It kills off family conversation. And it’s harder to get your children to read books. I became a confirmed reader when I was growing up in Glendale. I’ve loved reading all my life. Now I’ve got this daughter, Aissa, a very bright young lady -- but it is a hard job to get her to read. Television’s just too easy.

The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Draft-dodging is what chicken-hawks do best. Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh (this capon claimed he had a cyst on his fat ass), Newt Gingrich, former Attorney General John Ashcroft—he received seven deferments to teach business education at Southwest Missouri State—pompous Bill O’Reilly, Jeb Bush, hey, throw in John Wayne—they were all draft-dodgers. Not a single one of these mouth-breathing, cowardly, and meretricious buffoons fought for his country. All plumped for deferments. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani? Did not serve. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney? Did not serve in the military. (He served the Mormon Church on a thirty-month mission to France.) Former Senator Fred Thompson? Did not serve. Former President Ronald Reagan? Due to poor eyesight, he served in a noncombat role making movies for the Army in southern California during WWII. He later seems to have confused his role as an actor playing a tail gunner with the real thing. Did Rahm Emanuel serve? Yes, he did during the Gulf War 1991—in the Israeli Army. John Boehner did not serve, not a fucking second. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY? Not a minute! Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-MS? Avoided the draft. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-AZ—did not serve. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair John Cornyn, R-TX—did not serve. Former Senate Republican Policy Committee Chair John Ensign, R-NV? Did not serve. Jack Kemp? Dan Quayle? Never served a day. Not an hour. Not an afternoon. These are the jackasses that cherish memorial services and love to salute and adore hearing “Taps.

I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them." - J.B Books in The Shootist 1976, directed by Don Siegel

A fallow mind is a field of discontent.

Drop that or I'll blow ya straight to Jesus.

Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology.

A man oughta do what he thinks is best.

Westerns are American history brought to life. Those fuckers were badasses, Callie,” he told me with a smirk. “Plus, John Wayne’s the fuckin' shit.

It was a town mostly populated with elderly John Wayne fans and their caregivers.

How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours.” —Wayne W. Dyer

Fear is just one of the many words I don't know the meaning of.

As we live in an insane world major, maybe it's time we gave insane solutions a chance.

For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.

Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

I haven't had a fight since I was eleven. I only won that because she had an asthma attack.

You’re not swimming in glory until you find someone to swim with you. Glory isn’t glory if you don’t have someone to share it with. It’s just pride and bullshit on your own.” Unbelievable. Will Jones wasn’t only one badass cowboy; he pretty much could have been the love child of John Wayne and Yoda.

For many evangelicals, the masculine values men like John Wayne, William Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Jordan Peterson, and Donald Trump embody have come to define evangelicalism itself.

But Billy had done good deeds all the time. So had John Wayne Gacy, and dozens of others. It didn’t matter. It was all part of the disguise. Jazz realized that he couldn’t trust even his noblest impulses. They might not be genuine. They might just be camouflage.

In all those stories about people who sold their souls to the devil, I never quite understood why the devil was the bad guy, or why it was okay to screw him out of his soul. They got what they wanted: fame, money, love, whatever—though usually it turned out not to be what they really wanted or expected. Was that the devil's fault? I never thought so. Like John Wayne said, "Life's tough. It's even tougher when you're stupid.

I'm not the hero of this story. I'm a man who's been corrupted by his own unbearable pain. I'm a man who has too much blood on his hands to be called good.

I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.

Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn’t afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

It’s always the most patriotic asshole in the room that has absolutely no concept of what patriotism actually means.

D. Wayne Sharf slid across Winky Butterfield’s pasture like a greased weasel headed for a chicken house.

Fire can be our friend. Whether it's toasting marshmallows of raining down on Charlie.

If everything isn't black and white I say why the hell not.

Liberty Valance is a cancer on this fair town. He's the cancer and I'm the, uh...what cures cancer?

Did I ever tell you my father's last words to me? 'Careful son, I don't think the safety is on'. Before that.

Courage is being completely paralyzed with fear and taking the first step anyway. Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.

Courage is being scared to death and standing up anyway.

There's a lot of things great about life. But I thin tomorrow is the most important thing. It comes to us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.

Government has no wealth, and when a politician promises to give you something for nothing, he must first confiscate that wealth from you—either by direct taxes, or by the cruelly indirect tax of inflation.

Few would disagree that Herbert Mullin, who thought he was saving California from the great earthquake by killing people, and Ed Gein, who was making chairs out of human skin, were entirely insane when they committed their acts. The question becomes more difficult with somebody like law student Ted Bundy, who killed twenty women while at the same time working as a suicide prevention counselor, or John Wayne Gacy, who escorted the first lady and then went home to sleep of thirty-three trussed-up corpses under his house. On one hand their crimes seem "insane," yet on the other hand, Bundy and Gacy knew exactly what they were doing. How insane were they?

When you side with a man you stay with him, and if you can't do that you're like some animal. You're finished.

Evangelical militancy cannot be seen simply as a response to fearful times; for conservative white evangelicals, a militant faith required an ever-present sense of threat.

You were just babies then!", she said. "What?" I said. "You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!" I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. "But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation. "I-I don't know", I said. "Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine will ever be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. "I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'" She was my friend after that.

Sadly, our culture raises man to be strong and silent. Straight or gay, the pressure is on from the time we're very young to become our culture's John Wayne-style of man. * The more pain I can take, the more of a man I am. * Showing feelings is for women. * The more I can drink, the manlier I am. * Intimacy is sex; sex is intimacy. * Only women depend on others. * A man takes care of himself without help from others. * No one can hurt you if you're strong. * I am what I earn. * It is best to keep your problems to yourself. * Winning is all that really matters. Where did this stuff come from? It's everywhere in our society from the movies heroes we love to the politicians we vote for. Our culture demands that man fit in a tightly defined role.

In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making. Though rooted in different traditions and couched in different styles, their messages blended together to become the dominant chord in the cacophony of evangelical popular culture. And they had been right all along. The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation.

Constantine: "Bullocks. Anyone'll do anything." Chas: "What? Come on, John, everyone's got a line they reach!" Constantine: "Helen used to be the wildest woman I ever knew, Chas. A night out with her and you knew the reason we're all here, you knew what we could all be if we made the effort..She never drank or took anything and I knew she'd never need to and now look at the bleedin' state of her. No one has a line and no one has a soddin' moral code either, not outside a John Wayne movie

Although Wayne occupies a prominent place in the pantheon of evangelical heroes, he is but one of many rugged and even ruthless icons of masculinity that evangelicals imbued with religious significance. Like Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues. In this way, militant masculinity linked religious and secular conservatism, helping to secure an alliance with profound political ramifications. For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself.

Do you ever wear leather?" the guy asks. "What?" "Leather. Do you like leather?" "It doesn't exactly wipe me out." "I like to see boys in leather." I look at him cool. "Okay," I say, "what is it you want and how much are you willing to pay for it?" "I've got a leather jacket upstairs...Would you put it on?" "Just put it on?" "I'll go and get it." He leaves the horror hole and returns a few minutes later holding a leather flying jacket with a lambswool collar. There are tears in the jacket's sleeves, and the lambswool is yellow with age. John Wayne could've worn it in one of those crappy war films he made. "Put it on," the guy says. I give him a spiky smile and put on the jacket. "Okay, where's the plane, and what time's take-off?" "Drop your jeans and turn around.

in 2014, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Decision magazine featured Putin on its cover, and Franklin Graham praised the Russian president for standing up to the “gay and lesbian agenda.” The next year, Graham met with Putin in Moscow, an occasion that prompted him to praise Putin as a defender of “traditional Christianity” while accusing President Obama of promoting atheism. In foreign policy as in domestic politics, the cult of masculinity can transform loyalties and reshape alliances.

For some men, a wild, aggressive masculinity has always been untenable. One man with a physical disability recalls feeling that there was no place for him in the evangelicalism of the 2000s. If you weren’t “a sports or hunting fanatic in an evangelical church,” your position was marginal, as he put it. Another man, too, recounted that those who weren’t particularly athletic, who weren’t looking to “jump across ravines and climb rock walls” could feel like inauthentic men and second-class Christians.

He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington's eyes. But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of those eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death. If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky. If that eye, from its height, has been forced to notice you, if you do exist in the unbelievably frozen winter which lives behind that eye, you are marked, marked, marked, like a man in a black overcoat, crawling, fleeing, across the snow.

Today...major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies--Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few--and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that.

ACROSS TWO MILLENNIA of Christian history—and within the history of evangelicalism itself—there is ample precedent for sexism, racism, xenophobia, violence, and imperial designs. But there are also expressions of the Christian faith—and of evangelical Christianity—that have disrupted the status quo and challenged systems of privilege and power.

And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.” Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke. Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not. Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one. The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn’t because of standard U.S. anhedonia. Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being – but in fact he is far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.

To begin with, it was important for women to keep up their “curb appeal,” to “look and smell delicious,” to be “feminine, soft, and touchable,” not “dumpy, stringy, or exhausted”—at least if they wanted husbands to come home to them. But that was just the beginning. To keep a husband’s interest, Morgan was a strong believer in the power of costumes in the bedroom (or kitchen, living room, or backyard hammock), so that when a husband opened the front door each night it was like “opening a surprise package.” One day a “smoldering sexpot,” another “an all-American fresh beauty,” a pixie, a pirate, “a cow-girl or a show girl.” (Contrary to popular belief, Morgan never recommended that women clothe themselves in nothing but Saran Wrap. She wasn’t sure where that rumor got its start, though she conceded it was “a great idea.”) 3

And romance is just the place for creating mythic figures doing mythic things. Like carving 'civilzation' out of the wilderness. Like showing us what a hero looks life, a real, American, sprung-from-the soil, lethal-weapon-with-leggings, bona fide hero. And for a guy who never marries, he has a lot of offspring. Shane. The Virginian. The Ringo Kid. The Man with No Name. Just think how many actors would have had no careers without Natty Bumppo. Gary Cooper. John Wayne. Alan Ladd. Tom Mix. Clint Eastwood. Silent. Laconic. More committed to their horse or buddy than to a lady. Professional. Deadly. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence waxes prolix on Natty's most salient feature: he's a killer. And so are his offspring. This heros can talk, stiltedly to be sure, but he prefers silence. He appreciates female beauty but is way more committed to his canoe or his business partner (his business being death and war) or, most disturbingly, his long rifle, Killdeer. Dr. Freud, your three-o'clock is here. Like those later avatars, he is a wilderness god, part backwoods sage, part cold-blooded killer, part unwilling Prince Charming, part jack-of-all-trades, but all man. Here's how his creator describes him: 'a philosopher of the wilderness, simple-minded, faithful, utterly without fear, yet prudent.' A great character, no doubt, but hardly a person. A paragon. An archetype. A miracle. But a potentially real person--not so much.