Top 250 Larry McMurtry Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “It’s a funny life,” Augustus said. “All these cattle and nine-tenths of the horses is stolen, and yet we was once respected lawmen. If we get to Montana we’ll have to go into politics. You’ll wind up governor if the dern place ever gets to be a state. And you’ll spend all your time passing laws against cattle thieves.”

— Larry McMurtry

152. “A man that sleeps all night wastes too much of life.”

— Larry McMurtry

153. “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

154. “It’s his dern laziness,” Call said. “Jake just kind of drifts. Any wind can blow him.”

— Larry McMurtry

155. “But the English are different, and they don’t know how to be other than different.”

— Larry McMurtry

156. “It was only the thought that Deets was still knowing him, somehow, that kept him from feeling totally alone.”

— Larry McMurtry

157. “We might all get killed this afternoon, for all I know. That’s the wild for you – it’s got its dangers, which is part of the beauty.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

159. “I hate rude behavior in a man,′ he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. ‘I won’t tolerate it.’ He politely tipped his hat, and rode away.”

— Larry McMurtry

160. “She didn’t know what to do with the severed leg. She had cut it off, but she didn’t want to touch it or even look at it.”

— Larry McMurtry

161. “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

162. “Pussyfooting is a vice I have been concerned to avoid.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

165. “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

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

168. “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

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “If you want to be part of a human community you have to suffer fools – patiently, if not gladly – and you must practice civility as best you can.”

— Larry McMurtry

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

187. “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

188. “The woman had won. In the end, it seemed they always did.”

— Larry McMurtry

189. “The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.”

— Larry McMurtry

190. “He didn’t understand why women had such a need to question. He himself preferred just to let life happen, and act when opportunity arose.”

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

193. “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

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry

196. “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

197. “Razzy was insulting me silently somehow.”

— Larry McMurtry

198. “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

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

— Larry McMurtry

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

— Larry McMurtry