Lonesome Dove Quotes

If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.

It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae

Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.

The older the violin, the sweeter the music.

It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.

I'm sure partial to the evening,' Augustus said. 'The evening and the morning. If we just didn't have to have the rest of the dern day I'd be a lot happier.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

It's like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters

Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.

I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.

If I had a mind to rent pigs, I'd be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won't be stopped.

I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.

My main skills are talking and cooking biscuits,' Augustus said. 'And getting drunk on the porch.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

I never met a soul in this world as normal as me.

I hate rude behavior in a man,' he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. 'I won't tolerate it.' He politely tipped his hat, and rode away.

From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.

At times he felt that he had almost rather not be in love with her, for it brought him no peace. What was the use of it, if it was only going to be painful?

Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.

Nobody run off with her,” Roscoe said. "She just run off with herself, I guess.

A man who wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae

The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them.

Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn't remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation. "I hate a man that talks rude," he said. "I won't tolerate it.

Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity--they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.

Who asked them dern pigs?” he said. “I guess they tracked us,” Augustus said. “They’re enterprising pigs.

Lorie darlin', life in San Francisco, you see, is still just life. If you want any one thing too badly, it's likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself.

I don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it.

You don't look strong enough to trouble nobody around here.... We grow our own troubles--it would be a novelty to have some we ain't already used to.

Incompetents invariably made trouble for people other than themselves.

I figured out something, Lorie,” he said. “I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match, as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.

I see you’re in a hurry to get someplace. It’s a great mistake to hurry.” “Why?” Joe asked, puzzled by almost everything the traveler said. “Because the grave’s our destination,” Mr. Sedgwick said. “Those who hurry usually get to it quicker than those who take their time.

You know Deets is like me - he's not one to quit on a garment just because it's got a little age - spoken by Augustus McCrae

If you only come face-to-face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it’s bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day—that way they ain’t usually much worse than a dry shave.

Life makes everybody strange, if you keep living long enough,

By the time the shade had reached the river, Augustus would have mellowed with the evening and be ready for some intelligent conversation, which usually involved talking to himself.

It doesn’t do to sacrifice for people unless they want you to,” Clara said. “It’s just a waste.

The smartest man alive can’t learn much about a woman in two weeks.

How I wish I was like the water, Flowing so freely with every drop Let my every emotion wonder, No need to start, nor even stop How I wish I was like the fire, Burning with every flame up Leaving a trace of hot desire As a Phoenix raises its' wings up How I wish I was like the earth, Raising each flower from the ground Seeing the beauty of death and birth And then returning to the ground How I wish I was like the wind, Hearing each whisper, sound and thought A lonesome and wandering little wind, Shattering all that has been sought Oh, how I wish I was where you are, Not separated by empty space, so far It seems like we're galaxies apart, But we find hope within our heart And how I wish I was all of the above, So I can come below and yet forget, The beauty of angels which come down like a dove And demons who love with no regret.

Wrong theory,” Augustus said. “Talk’s the way to kill it. Anything gets boring if you talk about it enough, even death.

He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.

WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. —T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call

Once started, love couldn't easily be stopped.

Deets slapped his leg and laughed, the thought was so funny. When the rest of the outfit finally wondered down from the house they found the two of them grinning back and forth at one another. "Look at 'em," Augustus said. "You'd think they just discovered teeth.

Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country."--Augustus McCrae

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.

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.

The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.

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.

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.

It seemed to him harder, as he got older, to find a simple way of life.

Monkey John looked at the dead boy. "By God, life is cheap up here on the goddamned Canadian River." "Cheap," Blue Duck answered. "And it might get cheaper.

Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and

He knew what he could certainly do, and what he might do if he was lucky, and what he couldn’t do barring a miracle.

Young things mainly belong to themselves. How they grow up depends on who gets attached to them.

no medicine man or wise man knew why one man died and another lived. Wise men themselves often died before fools, and cowards before men who were brave.

This is a damn useless conversation. Goodbye. (Charles Goodnight to Woodrow Call)

. . . he had learned in his years of tracking Indians that things which seemed impossible often weren't. They only became so if one thought about them too much so that fear took over.

He sat where he was, on Mouse, in the grip of terrible indecision. He almost wished something would happen—a sudden attack of Mexicans or something. He might be killed, but at least he wouldn’t have to make a choice between disobeying Mr. Gus and disobeying Lorena.

For most of the hours of the day—and most of the months of the year—the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans.

There was something different about her, Jake had to admit. She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met in a woman. Certain mountains were that way, like the Bighorns .The air around them was so clear you could ride toward them for days without seeming to get any closer. And yet, if you kept riding, you would get to the mountains.

A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.

You’re the only man I know whose brain don’t work unless it’s in the shade.

Well, I got to admit I still like a fight,” Augustus said. “They sharpen the wits. The only other thing that does that is talking to women, which is usually more dangerous.

He didn’t tell Newt all he knew. He didn’t tell him that even when life seemed easy, it kept on getting harder.

figure the reason you don’t have much to say is you probably never met a man who liked to hear a woman talk.

People got opinions, that's all they've got.

Ride with an outlaw, die with him," he added. "I admit it's a harsh code. But you rode on the other side long enough to know how it works. I'm sorry you crossed the line, though." Jake's momentary optimism had passed, and he felt tired and despairing. He would have liked a good bed in a whorehouse and a nice night's sleep. "I never seen no line, Gus," he said. "I was just trying to get to Kansas without getting scalped.

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew. It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. The the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dirt dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air. It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.

Death and worse happened on the plains.

You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.

We mostly quarreled. He wanted what I wouldn’t give. I wanted what he didn’t have.

He wondered if all men felt such disappointment when thinking of themselves. He didn’t know.

She had always loved to tease and considered it an irony of her life that she was often drawn to men who didn’t recognize teasing even when she was inflicting it on them.

His memories were too sad, his hopes too thin. To have to say things on paper seemed a terrible task, for it stirred the memories.

Don't be trying to give back pain for pain...You can't get even measures in business like this.

The whole point of loyalty was not to change: stick with those who stuck with you.

perhaps as he grew older he would learn to trust mysteries and not fear them.

You better introduce yourself before you start talking Latin.

Is the girl all right?” “She’s had an ordeal but she’s young,” Augustus said. “She won’t forget it, but she might outlive it.

Several times in his life he had felt an intense desire to start over, to somehow turn back the clock of his life to a point where he might, if he were careful, avoid the many mistakes he had made the first time around.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career

The first difference Newt noticed about being grown up was that time didn't pass as slow.

I suppose she's just dying of living--that's the one infection that strikes us all down, sooner or later.

It’s his dern laziness,” Call said. “Jake just kind of drifts. Any wind can blow him.

The other men were easy to talk to, but they didn’t know anything. If one stopped to think about it, it was depressing how little most men learned in their lifetimes.

Better by far never to have known the pleasure than to have the pain that followed.

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.

How he died hadn't been funny, Newt thought. "It's all right, though," Augustus said. "It's mostly bones we're riding over anyway. Why, think of all the buffalo that have died on these plains. Buffalo and other critters too. And the Indians have been here forever; their bones are down there in the earth. I'm told that over in the Old Country you can't dig six feet without uncovering skulls and leg bones and such. People have been living there since the beginning, and their bones have kinda filled up the ground. It's interesting to think about, all the bones in the ground. But it's just fellow creatures, it's nothing to shy from.

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the little backyard was filled with the little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.

As she was finishing her song, the notes dipped down low—they carried a sadness that was more than a sadness at the death of men; rather it was a sadness at the lives of men, and of women. It reminded those who heard the rising, dipping notes, of notes of hopes that had been born, and, yet, died; of promise, and the failure of promise.

I don’t know anything about babies,” he said. “No, and you’ve never lived any place but Arkansas,” Clara said. “But you ain’t stupid and you ain’t nailed down. You can live other places and you can learn about children—people dumber than you learn about them.

Virtually all his life he had been in the position of leading groups of men, yet the truth was he had never liked groups. Men he admired for their abilities in action almost always brought themselves down in his estimation if he had to sit around and listen to them talk—or watch them drink or play cards or run off after women. Listening to men talk usually made him feel more alone than if he were a mile away by himself under a tree. He had never really been able to take part in the talk. The endless talk of cards and women made him feel more set apart—and even a little vain. If that was the best they could think of, then they were lucky they had him to lead them. It seemed immodest, but it was a thought that often came to him.

See this page of paper? It’s blank,” Scull said. “That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir—this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it’s harder than fighting Lee. Why, it’s harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention,

The thing that Buffalo Hump was most grateful for, as he rode into the emptiness, was the knowledge that in the years of his youth and manhood he had drawn the lifeblood of so many enemies. He had been a great killer; it was his way and the way of his people; no one in his tribe had killed so often and so well. The killings were good to remember, as he rode his old horse deeper into the llano, away from all the places where people came.

Are you expecting a war party?” Call asked the judge. “You seem to be thoroughly armed.” “I expect perdition, always have,” the judge replied. “I keep this building at my back, and several guns handy, in case perdition arrives in a form that’s susceptible to bullets. I expect it will come in the disease form, though. I’m susceptible to diseases, and you can’t shoot a goddamn disease.

But once in a while, even if nobody mentioned one, the thought of women entered his head all on its own, and once it came it usually tneded to stay for several hours, filling his noggin like a cloud of gnats. Of course, a cloud of gnats was nothing in comparison to a cloud of Gulf coast mosquitoes, so the thought of women was not that bothersome, but it was a thought Pea would rather not have in his head.

Dish said no more, and Augustus decided not to tease him. Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity- they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour. Young Dish, skilled cowhand that he was, might not live to see the whores of Ogallala, and the tender feelings he harbored for Lorena might be the sweetest he would ever have.