Top 250 Larry McMurtry Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Why would you want to keep in practice being wrong?” Call asked. “I’d think it would be something you’d try to avoid.” “You can’t avoid it, you’ve got to learn to handle it,” Augustus said. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

52. “Listening to women ain’t the fashion in this part of the country.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

54. “I don’t eat the white of eggs if I can help it,” Jasper said. “I hear it causes blindness.”

— Larry McMurtry

55. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

56. “Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you’re a genius – Dostoyevsky perhaps.”

— Larry McMurtry

57. “He was fairly drunk, and feeling melancholy about all the sinking he had done in the world. Throughout the rough years the Greek alphabet had leaked out of his mind a letter at a time – in fact, the candle of knowledge he had set out with had burned down to a sorry stub.”

— Larry McMurtry

58. “She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met a woman.”

— Larry McMurtry

59. “The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings – crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands are few.”

— Larry McMurtry

60. “A chain of follies had put him there: Call’s abrupt decision to become a cattleman and his own decision, equally abrupt, to try and rescue a girl foolish enough to be taken in by Jake Spoon. None of it was sensible, yet he had to admit there was something about such follies that he liked.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

62. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

63. “He and Augustus had discussed the question of leadership many times. “It ain’t complicated,” Augustus maintained. “Most men doubt their own abilities. You don’t. It’s no wonder they want to keep you around. It keeps them from having to worry about failure all the time.”

— Larry McMurtry

64. “I’m a fastidious bookman and have never liked reading books with library markings or other messy defects.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

66. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

67. “And the blue pigs walked all the way to Montana just to be eaten. Life ain’t for sissies, as Augustus might have said.”

— Larry McMurtry

68. “The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.”

— Larry McMurtry

69. “Do your best, if you happen to love a fool. You’ll have my sympathy. Some folks will preach that it’s a woman’s duty never to quit, once you make a bond with a man. I say that’s folly. A bond has to work two ways. If a man don’t hold up his end, there comes a time to quit.”

— Larry McMurtry

70. “I don’t believe in protein,” I said. “I think it’s a myth, like vitamins. I don’t believe in nutrition, in fact. I think it’s all a myth.”

— Larry McMurtry

71. “Life ain’t for sissies, as Augustus might have said.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

73. “They respected only the strong men who could not be insulted without a price being paid in blood.”

— Larry McMurtry

74. “Now there was a crack, a kind of canyon, between the Woodrow Call sitting with Teresa on the train and the Woodrow Call who had made the campfire that morning and saddled his horse. The crack was permanent, the canyon deep. He could not get across it, back to himself. His last moments as himself had been spent casually – making a campfire, drinking coffee, saddling a horse.”

— Larry McMurtry

75. “Po Campo had given him a hailstone dipped in molasses and he sat licking it and feeling alternately happy and sad while the men got dressed and prepared to be cowboys again.”

— Larry McMurtry

76. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

77. “I’d like to see you think the roof back on that barn,” Call said.”

— Larry McMurtry

78. “It feels silly to kiss a smile. At best you just sort of bump teeth.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

80. “He might die, but at least he could fight first, and not simply pass his days shaking at the expectation of slaughter.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

82. “A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.”

— Larry McMurtry

83. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

85. “Self-parody is the first portent of age.”

— Larry McMurtry

86. “He didn’t feel sad. The one thing he knew about Texas was that he was lucky to be leaving it alive – and, in fact, he had a long way to go before he could be sure of accomplishing that much.”

— Larry McMurtry

87. “Many white men could not trust things unless they could be explained; and yet the most beautiful things, such as the trackless flight of birds, could never be explained.”

— Larry McMurtry

88. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

89. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

90. “Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity – they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits.”

— Larry McMurtry

91. “The best to do with a death was to move on from it.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

93. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

94. “Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one’s youth.”

— Larry McMurtry

95. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

96. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

97. “You are like me, a free man. The sky is your wife.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

100. “However, he didn’t have a high opinion of the average man’s ability as a fighter. The majority of men couldn’t fight at all and even most outlaws were the merest amateurs when it came to battle. Few could shoot well, and even fewer had any mind for strategy.”

— Larry McMurtry