Top 80 Craig Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Stay calm, have courage, and watch for signs.”

— Craig Johnson

2. “Writing is a solitary pursuit and I think you have to be partially at peace with yourself, but it’s the other part that’s usually producing the stuff worth reading.”

— Craig Johnson

3. “I don’t trust people who don’t like animals. Hell, animals are the finest people I know.”

— Craig Johnson

4. “You will stand and see the good, but you will also stand and see the bad – the dead shall rise and the blind will see.”

— Craig Johnson

5. “Somewhere in the distance, the synchronic circles of our pasts had tripped a domino, and the steady whirr had grown till it now drowned with the roar of contingency.”

— Craig Johnson

6. “Temptation out of reach does you no good.”

— Craig Johnson

7. “It would be nice if life weren’t so messy, but that’s just not the nature of things; we want things to be perfect, but most of the time we just spend our existence cleaning up the messes we make – and sometimes the messes of other people, people about whom we care most in the world.”

— Craig Johnson

8. “She was classic Wyoming, that indiscriminate age between thirty and a hundred where the women find a comfort for themselves and just settle in.”

— Craig Johnson

9. “He had his mother’s looks, his father’s temper, and nobody’s brains.”

— Craig Johnson

10. “Nobody makes an emotional bulletproof vest, so you just have to carry the shrapnel around with you.”

— Craig Johnson

11. “I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin – a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.”

— Craig Johnson

12. “I have gotten to the age where I try and let other people solve their own problems.” “What age is that, anyway?”

— Craig Johnson

13. “Walt Longmire: “I punched him in the fist with my nose, but I think he’ll live.”

— Craig Johnson

14. “Revolution is the industry of young men.”

— Craig Johnson

15. “It’s never about who’s the fastest, strongest, toughest – it’s always about who, when everyone else would pause, will commit.”

— Craig Johnson

16. “Sometimes it was like that, I suppose; some people become so important in your life that they’re almost like a trademark, but then they’re gone. Sometimes they might reappear, but they’re nothing at all like what you’ve assembled in your mind since their departure; sometimes you can’t even stand them anymore, because they break up the legend and nothing dies harder than a good, personal legend.”

— Craig Johnson

17. “They have a saying, the Basque. That just because the cat has kittens in the oven, it doesn’t make them biscuits.”

— Craig Johnson

18. “Rarely do you get those glimmers of unadulterated love and, if you’re smart, you pack them away for darker days.”

— Craig Johnson

19. “It is difficult to confrontmadness, because insanity is a stranger to reason and any reasonable response would be insane.”

— Craig Johnson

20. “Scientists say there is a noise that snowflakes make when they land on water, like the wail of a coyote; the sound reaches a climax and then fades away, all in about one ten-thousandth of a second.”

— Craig Johnson

21. “There’s a kind of cocksure attitude that overtakes a man in the presence of the dearly departed, a you’re-dead-and-I’m-not kind of perspective.”

— Craig Johnson

22. “Tell her how much you love her; everything after that is small talk.”

— Craig Johnson

23. “Some fires can’t bear to dampen and can provide heat even from the distance of time. As.”

— Craig Johnson

24. “Cop tricks pale in comparison with mother tricks.”

— Craig Johnson

25. “Indian Alzheimer’s” – where you forget everything but the grudges.”

— Craig Johnson

26. “I keep it in there as a reminder and to keep temptation at hand. Temptation out of reach does you no good.”

— Craig Johnson

27. “I’ve seen men ruined by drink, drugs and dodge pickup trucks, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone ruined by softcore porn...”

— Craig Johnson

28. “Be careful what you say and who you say it in front of in this place, every ear is guaranteed to have a running mouth.”

— Craig Johnson

29. “That was the beauty of horse stealing, though – you could always ride your stolen property.”

— Craig Johnson

30. “You keep going, and you hope for the best, and sometimes, maybe not very often, your hopes come true.”

— Craig Johnson

31. “There were clouds at the mountains, and the snow pack reflected the sour-lemon sun into one of the most beautiful and perverse sunsets I had ever seen. The clouds were dappled like the hindquarters of an Appaloosa colt, and the beauty kicked just as hard.”

— Craig Johnson

32. “I have found in most relationships with women it is best to remember their birthdays but forget their age.”

— Craig Johnson

33. “Dog’s ears went up at the word “ham”: they say dogs have a vocabulary of about twenty words, and I was pretty sure that seventeen of Dog’s were ham.”

— Craig Johnson

34. “I was brought up on a ranch but, because of my father, the romance of guns had somehow escaped me. In his eyes, a gun was a tool, not some half-assed deity. Guys who named their guns worried him and me. I.”

— Craig Johnson

35. “I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but asking women their age isn’t one of them.”

— Craig Johnson

36. “As your trusted Indian scout, it is important for me to warn you that you are now on perilously thin ice.”

— Craig Johnson

37. “Small chains wound their way through the trigger guards with little bronze locks at the end of each row. It was like a chain gang for weapons. Some of them might be good, some of them might be bad, but there was no way to tell until somebody picked them up.”

— Craig Johnson

38. “I looked at her, looking being one of my better law-enforcement techniques.”

— Craig Johnson

39. “The place was packed as we flooded in, all the patrons freezing at the sight of an armed sheriff, two deputies, an Indian, and a construction worker; we probably looked like the Village People.”

— Craig Johnson

40. “I’ve always been taught that religion is supposed to be a comfort to people, not a threat. I think these people have perverted something that’s supposed to be holy and turned it into a weapon.”

— Craig Johnson

41. “Maybe he was what Lucian would have turned out to be if the old sheriff hadn’t have lived in such interesting times. A couple of years in a Japanese prison camp might be just what Turk needed. But I didn’t have a bridge over the river Kwai for him to build so we had to settle for Powder Junction.”

— Craig Johnson

42. “I looked over at her; if women knew how good they looked in the dash light of oversized pickup trucks, they’d never get out of them.”

— Craig Johnson

43. “Maybe there really isn’t any such thing as mortality; life simply wears us out with love.”

— Craig Johnson

44. “The problem with anger is that once it burns out, you’re left with empty tanks.”

— Craig Johnson

45. “Life is like that.” He flipped through a few more limp pages. “You collect things as you go – the things you think are important – and soon they weigh you down until you realize that these things you cared so much about mean nothing at all. Our natures are our natures.” He grunted. “And they are all we are left with.”

— Craig Johnson

46. “I flattered myself by thinking that, if faced with such a circumstance, I would respond within the letter of the law; but passion is a strange thing, a thing that warps and twists everything with which it comes in contact.”

— Craig Johnson

47. “All the important promises are about leaving or not leaving.”

— Craig Johnson

48. “He didn’t sound particularly drunk, but Bob’s a professional, so you never can tell.”

— Craig Johnson

49. “This is how it ends with everyone. You fall – you don’t get back up.”

— Craig Johnson

50. “Seeing her again was like unearthing an emotional library card with a lot of overdues.”

— Craig Johnson