Ox Bow Incident Quotes

Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones.

True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has developed with mankind ... If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?

I'm slow with a new idea, and want to think it over alone, where I'm sure it's the idea and not the man that's getting me.

That hatred of the railroad was Winder’s only original notion, and when he got mad that always came in some way. Everything else was what he’d heard somebody, or most everybody, say, only he always got angry enough to make it sound like a conviction.

Although he avoided western novels (with the exceptions of The Ox-Bow Incident and Doctorow’s brilliant Welcome to Hard Times)

I failed, he said, I got talking my ideas. It's my greatest failing.

The Ox-Bow Incident, Body and Soul, White Heat, The Third Man, The Brothers Rico, Riot in Cell Block 11

She wasn’t given to thinking very far, but she did a lot of intelligent feeling.

Cold wind,” I began. He looked at me as if I’d said something important. Then he said, “It’s more than wind,” and stared ahead of him again. “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t get his drift, but if he wanted to talk, “maybe” shouldn’t stop him. “It’s a lot more,” he said, as if I’d contradicted him. “You can’t go hunting men like coyotes after rabbits and not feel anything about it. Not without being like any other animal. The worst animal.” “There’s a difference; we have reasons.” “Names for the same thing,” he said sharply. “Does that make us any better? Worse, I’d say. At least coyotes don’t make excuses.

A. B. Guthrie’s 1947 novel The Big Sky (even better than its sequel, The Way West, which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940), and Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949) were all made into well-regarded movies, but these three classics of Western fiction continue to make for wonderful reading.

Oh, we’re smart,” he said, the same way. “It’s the same thing,” he cried; “all we use it for is power. Yes, we’ve got them scared all right, all of them, except the tame things we’ve taken the souls out of. We’re the cocks of the dung-heap, all right; the bullies of the globe.” “We’re not hunting rabbits tonight,” I reminded him. “No; our own kind. A wolf wouldn’t do that; not a mangy coyote. That’s the hunting we like now, our own kind. The rest can’t excite us any more.” “We don’t have to hunt men often,” I told him. “Most people never have. They get along pretty well together.” “Oh, we love each other,” he said. “We labor for each other, suffer for each other, admire each other. We have all the pack instincts, all right, and nice names for them.

Law is more than the words that put it on the books; law is more than any decisions that may be made from it; law is more than the particular code of it stated at any one time or in any one place or nation; more than any man, lawyer or judge, sheriff or jailer, who may represent it. True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has evolved with mankind. None of man's temples, none of his religions, none of his weapons, his tools, his arts his sciences, nothing else he has grown to, is so great a thing as his justice, his sense of justice.

From Walt: The Grapes of Wrath, Les Misérables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, The Ox-Bow Incident, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote (where your nickname came from), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and anything by Anton Chekhov. From Henry: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Cheyenne Autumn, War and Peace, The Things They Carried, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, The Blessing Way, Beyond Good and Evil, The Teachings of Don Juan, Heart of Darkness, The Human Comedy, The Art of War. From Vic: Justine, Concrete Charlie: The Story of Philadelphia Football Legend Chuck Bednarik, Medea (you’ll love it; it’s got a great ending), The Kama Sutra, Henry and June, The Onion Field, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zorba the Greek, Madame Bovary, Richie Ashburn’s Phillies Trivia (fuck you, it’s a great book). From Ruby: The Holy Bible (New Testament), The Pilgrim’s Progress, Inferno, Paradise Lost, My Ántonia, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Poems of Emily Dickinson, My Friend Flicka, Our Town. From Dorothy: The Gastronomical Me, The French Chef Cookbook (you don’t eat, you don’t read), Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals From Death Row, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Something Fresh, The Sound and the Fury, The Maltese Falcon, Pride and Prejudice, Brides-head Revisited. From Lucian: Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Band of Brothers, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Virginian, The Basque History of the World (so you can learn about your heritage you illiterate bastard), Hondo, Sackett, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Quartered Safe Out Here. From Ferg: Riders of the Purple Sage, Kiss Me Deadly, Lonesome Dove, White Fang, A River Runs Through It (I saw the movie, but I heard the book was good, too), Kip Carey’s Official Wyoming Fishing Guide (sorry, kid, I couldn’t come up with ten but this ought to do).

Brennan often cited Goodbye, My Lady as one of his favorite films. Certainly it was a labor of love in the close collaboration with the director, William Wellman, better known for his action films and for The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Skeeter (Brandon DeWilde) lives with his none too ambitious uncle Jesse (Brennan) in a swamp, where they find a strange dog with a hyena-like laugh. (It is, in fact a basenji, bred in Africa). Jesse realizes the dog must have escaped from a very different environment, but Skeeter adopts the dog without thinking about the consequences should the dog’s true owner show up. Much of the picture is taken up with Skeeter training the dog to hunt better than other hounds. The deliberate and careful way Wellman paces the film makes it utterly absorbing, even as Brennan delivers one of his best understated performances. With its emphasis on rapport with nature and the land and taking responsibility for other animals, the inspirational script serves as Walter Brennan’s credo. And when the dog’s owner shows up, Skeeter has to learn how to let go of his creation, making for an ending far more real than those of most family films. Sidney Poitier has a small role as a neighbor, and though this story is set in Georgia, there is no evidence of segregation. To the contrary, Poitier’s character appears quite at home with his white neighbors, with whom he shares a bond with the land and its creatures.

but you can feel awful guilty about nothing when the men you're with don't trust you.

the north and south ends, there wasn’t much to Bridger’s Wells: Arthur Davies’ general store, the land and mining claims office, Canby’s saloon, the long, sagging Bridger Inn, with its double-decker porch, and the Union Church, square and bare as a New England meeting house, and set out on the west edge of town, as if it wanted to get as far from the other church as it could without being left alone.

You goin’?” he rasped at me, shaking his stick at the corner. “John, John,” the old lady clucked, “it don’t do for you to go gettin’ excited.” “I ain’t excited,” the old man twittered, pounding his stick on the road, “I ain’t excited; I’m jest plumb disgusted.” I’d stopped because he’d caught hold of my shirtsleeve. “You’re goin’, ain’t you?” he threatened me again. “It looks like it, dad,” I said.

Well?” “Don’t rush me,” Gil said. “Take your time,” Canby said. “It don’t look to me,” Gil said, “like you was so rushed you couldn’t wait!” “It’s not that. I hate to see a man who can’t make up his mind.” “What do you care?” “I either have to put them to bed or listen to their troubles, depending on what they drink,” Canby said. His mouth only opened a slit when he talked, and the words came out as if he enjoyed them, but had to lift a weight to get them started. “I ain’t lookin’ for either sleep or comfortin’,” Gil said. “And if I was, I wouldn’t come here for it.” “I feel better,” said Canby. “What’ll you have? Whisky?

This snow will be three feet deep by morning,” the first man said. There was a lot of muttering in agreement. After trying to see into the clearing all that time the job did look ridiculous. Also, unseasonable winter takes the heart out of men the same as it does out of animals. You just get used to the sun and the limber feeling, and when they go you want to crawl back into your hole.

How you feeling now, fellow?” he asked. “Good,” I said. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “This still don’t have to be our picnic.” “It looks like it was,” I said. “Yeah,” he agreed, “but it ain’t.

a gentle, permanent reality that was in him like his bones or his heart, that made him seem like an everlasting part of things.

None of them were even married, and the kind of women they got a chance to know weren’t likely to be changed by what a rustler would do to them.

he is talking about the whole American society or, rather, the whole human society. And the horror lies in the irony: it is far easier to understand and forgive the brutal actions of slaves than it is to understand and forgive the brutal actions of men who think themselves free and act as slaves. Here is Clark’s most explicit criticism of the American Dream: the forms of law will not suffice if they are not based upon true individualism. And these Americans are not individuals nor are they concerned with individuals.