Top 250 Larry McMurtry Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.”

— Larry McMurtry

152. “It didn’t do to ignore men. The majority of them were harmless, with nothing worse than a low capacity to irritate – they were worse than chiggers but not as bad as bedbugs, in her view.”

— Larry McMurtry

153. “I needed a man,” Call replied. “I was hoping he might turn out to be a fighter.” “No, he’s just a jailer,” Billy said.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

155. “If he didn’t like the way she did things, he was free to do them different – but he never did them different. He just fussed at her.”

— Larry McMurtry

156. “That’s one of the only things I look forward to about an evening like this, you know -someone to drink tea with at the end of it. For all I know, the whole point of civilization is to provide one with someone to drink tea with at the end of an evening. Otherwise you have no one with whom to talk over whatever may have happened during the evening. Dinner parties are often more fun to talk about than they are to attend – at least they aren’t complete until they’ve been discussed.”

— Larry McMurtry

157. “If we know anything about man, it’s that he’s not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.”

— Larry McMurtry

158. “In the vastness of the desert, each reduction of the group made them realize how small they were, how puny, in relation to the space they were traveling through.”

— Larry McMurtry

159. “He remembered the cold nights in their Arkansas cabin when he was a boy – how his mother piled quilts on top of him and his brothers, how peaceful it seemed under the quilts. Then it seemed like sleep was one of the most wonderful things in life.”

— Larry McMurtry

160. “Little by little, the look of the land changes by the men we admire.”

— Larry McMurtry

161. “Of all the women he knew, she had meant the most; and was the one person in his life he felt he had missed, in some ways.”

— Larry McMurtry

162. “When we finish up with this planet the insects will take over. You may not think it, seeing all this fair land, but the days of the human race are numbered. The insects are waiting their turn.”

— Larry McMurtry

163. “When Newt walked in the barn to get a rope, the Captain turned and handed him a holstered pistol and a gun belt. “Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it,” he added, a little solemnly.”

— Larry McMurtry

164. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

165. “I’ll pass on snow myself, when I have the option.”

— Larry McMurtry

166. “I still think we ought to just hire the town and take it with us. Then we’d have a good barkeep and someone to play the pianer.”

— Larry McMurtry

167. “I sometimes think the sexual organs were put there to keep the human race humble,” she said. “They’ve certainly kept me humble.”

— Larry McMurtry

168. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

169. “That things were mysterious did not make them less valuable.”

— Larry McMurtry

170. “Basically Jake just dreamed his way through life and somehow got by with it.”

— Larry McMurtry

171. “Besides, though she considered herself his sweetheart, she didn’t consider him her master.”

— Larry McMurtry

172. “Give Call a grievance, however silly, and he would save it like money.”

— Larry McMurtry

173. “Looking at her, though, was like looking at the hills. The hills stayed as they were. You could go them, if you had the means, but they extended no greeting.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

175. “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.”

— Larry McMurtry

176. “He had known several men who had lost limbs in battle; the men all claimed that they still felt things in the place where the limb had been. It was natural enough, then, that with Bill suddenly gone he and Gus would continue to have some of the feelings that went with friendship, even though the friend was gone.”

— Larry McMurtry

177. “When he walked out into the lots to catch his horse, he felt grown and complete for the first time in his life.”

— Larry McMurtry

178. “But then July accepted it and never scolded back, so perhaps that was the way of the world: women scolded, and men kept quiet and stayed out of the way as much as possible.”

— Larry McMurtry

179. “Everyone who came to see him asked questions that were either stupid or impertinent. Better to see no one than to see fools.”

— Larry McMurtry

180. “Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on – she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better – in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold.”

— Larry McMurtry

181. “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?”

— Larry McMurtry

182. “Ikey had passed his seventieth year and considered anyone under fifty to be callow, at best.”

— Larry McMurtry

183. “But as far as trusting the general run of men, there was no need, since she had no intention of ever expecting anything from one of them again.”

— Larry McMurtry

184. “I pride myself on being able to put up with a lot,” Nellie said. “But bagpipers are pretty much my limit.”

— Larry McMurtry

185. “They say money kinda melts when you take it across a border.”

— Larry McMurtry

186. “Son, this is a sad thing,” Augustus said. “Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good. Don’t you go attempting vengeance. You’ve got more urgent business. If I ever run into Blue Duck I’ll kill.”

— Larry McMurtry

187. “All his work, and it hadn’t saved anyone, or slowed the moment of their going by a minute.”

— Larry McMurtry

188. “Somewhere along the Rio Concho, he had stopped feeling that he lived in a world where ledgers mattered.”

— Larry McMurtry

189. “You can scare off a lot of cowboys just by looking mean, I guess.”

— Larry McMurtry

190. “Her own folly amused her: she had once thought of herself as smart – but look at where she was.”

— Larry McMurtry

191. “Razzy was insulting me silently somehow.”

— Larry McMurtry

192. “Me and Call have always liked to get where we started for, even if it don’t make a damn bit of sense.”

— Larry McMurtry

193. “It only went to show what he already knew, which was that there were more dangers in life than even the sharpest training could anticipate.”

— Larry McMurtry

194. “It was often that way with women, it seemed. One minute Lorie would be drilling holes in him with her eyes, and the next minute she and Clarie would be combing one another’s hair and singing tunes.”

— Larry McMurtry

195. “He gathers information that we can’t see, and puts it together.”

— Larry McMurtry

196. “Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who’d rather have the book than the click. A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.”

— Larry McMurtry

197. “In fact, July felt he had reached a point in his life where virtually nothing was known.”

— Larry McMurtry

198. “People got opinions, that’s all they’ve got.”

— Larry McMurtry

199. “Earlier in his life he had done many foolish things in order to convince himself that he was not worthless.”

— Larry McMurtry

200. “Perhaps, he thought, as he turned back, that was what Augustus wanted: just to be free for a few days, just to saddle his horse and ride.”

— Larry McMurtry