Top 70 Charles Portis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”

— Charles Portis

2. “There is nothing free except the Grace of God.”

— Charles Portis

3. “Time just gets away from us.”

— Charles Portis

4. “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”

— Charles Portis

5. “Listen, here’s what I’d like to do: I’d like to live in a trailer and play records all night.”

— Charles Portis

6. “I know what they said even if they would not say it to my face. People love to talk. They love to slander you if you have any substance.”

— Charles Portis

7. “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”

— Charles Portis

8. “It was old President Diaz who said that nothing ever happens in Mexico until it happens. Things rock along from day to day, and then all at once you are caught up in a rush of unforeseen events.”

— Charles Portis

9. “There is no knowing what is in a man’s heart.”

— Charles Portis

10. “Lucille Biggers Langford and Florence Mabry Whiteside. As the.”

— Charles Portis

11. “If you want anything done right you will have to see to it yourself every time.”

— Charles Portis

12. “Nothing I like to do pays well.”

— Charles Portis

13. “One time you smash a bug with no mercy. Another time you find one helpless on his back with his legs flailing the air, and you flip him over and let him go on his way. The struggle that touches the heart.”

— Charles Portis

14. “I always go backwards when I am backing up.”

— Charles Portis

15. “What have you done when you have bested a fool?”

— Charles Portis

16. “You cannot carry water on both shoulders.”

— Charles Portis

17. “The wicked flee when none pursueth.”

— Charles Portis

18. “Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!”

— Charles Portis

19. “Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners.”

— Charles Portis

20. “I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious “claptrap.” My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33. Stonehill.”

— Charles Portis

21. “My Master of Arts degree means nothing at all to these monkeys and I have come to share their indifference.”

— Charles Portis

22. “I am ready. I have repented my sins and soon I will be in heaven with Christ my savior. Now I must die like a man.”

— Charles Portis

23. “Nothing is too long or too short either if you have a true and interesting tale and what I call a “graphic” writing style combined with educational aims.”

— Charles Portis

24. “When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous. I.”

— Charles Portis

25. “He said, “You are lucky to be traveling in a place where a spring is so handy. In my country you can ride for days and see no ground water. I have lapped filthy water from a hoofprint and was glad to have it. You don’t know what discomfort is until you have nearly perished for water.” Rooster said, “If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar.”

— Charles Portis

26. “I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces?”

— Charles Portis

27. “Mexican homes as a rule are closed off to the world by high blank walls of yellowish masonry, topped with broken glass to discourage escaladores, or climbing burglars. The gardens and fountains and other delights are hidden, as in an Arab city.”

— Charles Portis

28. “But I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?”

— Charles Portis

29. “As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”

— Charles Portis

30. “You go for a man hard and fast enough and he don’t have time to think about how many is with him, he thinks about himself and how he may get clear out of the wrath that is about to set down on him.”

— Charles Portis

31. “If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go.”

— Charles Portis

32. “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”

— Charles Portis

33. “There is no generosity in women. They want everything coming in and nothing going out. They show no trust. Lord God, how they hate to pay you! They will get the work of two men out of you and I guess they would beat you with whips if they were able to. No sir, not me. Never. A man will not work for a woman, not unless he has clabber for brains.”

— Charles Portis

34. “I noticed that the houses in Fort Smith were numbered but it was no city at all compared to Little Rock. I thought then and still think that Fort Smith ought to be in Oklahoma instead of Arkansas...”

— Charles Portis

35. “In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West.”

— Charles Portis

36. “I don’t think about you at all when your mouth is closed.”

— Charles Portis

37. “We must each of us bear our own misfortunes.”

— Charles Portis

38. “As we rode along LaBoeuf commenced whistling tunes, perhaps to take his mind off his sore arm. Rooster said, “God damn a man that whistles!” It was the wrong thing to say if he wished it to stop.”

— Charles Portis

39. “I will own I was somewhat afraid of them although they were not, as you may imagine, wild Comanches with painted faces and outlandish garb but rather civilized Creeks and Cherokees and Choctaws from Mississippi and Alabama who had owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy and wore store clothes. Neither were they sullen and grave. I thought them on the cheerful side as they nodded and spoke greetings.”

— Charles Portis

40. “LaBoeuf’s fair-complected face became congested with angry blood.”

— Charles Portis

41. “If you don’t have no schooling you are up against it in this country, sis. That is the way of it. No sir, that man has no chance any more. No matter if he has got sand in his craw, others will push him aside, little thin fellows that have won spelling bees back home.”

— Charles Portis

42. “Now I was surprised and light-headed, like a domestic fowl that finds itself able to fly over a low fence in a moment of terror.”

— Charles Portis

43. “I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful.”

— Charles Portis

44. “He drank even as he rode, which looked difficult. I cannot say it slowed him down any, but it did make him silly. Why do people wish to be silly?”

— Charles Portis

45. “In a very few minutes this torture was mercifully ended. Blackie fell to the ground and died, his brave heart burst and mine broken. There never lived a nobler pony.”

— Charles Portis

46. “What is your work in this world?” “I don’t know what it is yet. I’m back in school now.” “It’s getting pretty late in the day for you to have so few interests and convictions. How old are you, Mr. Midge?”

— Charles Portis

47. “They later moved to a tin-roof house that was situated in a gas field under a spectacular flare that burned all the time. Big copper-green beetles the size of mice came from all over the Southland to see it and die in it. At night their corpses pankled down on the tin roof.”

— Charles Portis

48. “The People’s’ historic duty was to become a nameless herd and submit to the absolute control of a small pack of wily and vicious intellectuals.”

— Charles Portis

49. “I’m white and I don’t dance, but that doesn’t mean I have all the answers.”

— Charles Portis

50. “Do they pay you by the hour or what? Norwood said to the monocled peanut face.”

— Charles Portis