Lonesome Dove Quotes

If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.

I'm sure partial to the evening,' Augustus said. 'The evening and the morning. If we just didn't have to have the rest of the dern day I'd be a lot happier.

I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. 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.

It's like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added.

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.

Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.

I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.

Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn't remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation. "I hate a man that talks rude," he said. "I won't tolerate it.

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.

If I had a mind to rent pigs, I'd be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won't be stopped.

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

From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.

Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.

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?.

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

Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity--they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.

I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match, as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.

They’re enterprising pigs.

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.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. —T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land.

WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.

Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked.

You know Deets is like me - he's not one to quit on a garment just because it's got a little age - spoken by Augustus McCrae.

By the time the shade had reached the river, Augustus would have mellowed with the evening and be ready for some intelligent conversation, which usually involved talking to himself.

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.

Deets slapped his leg and laughed, the thought was so funny. When the rest of the outfit finally wondered down from the house they found the two of them grinning back and forth at one another. "Look at 'em," Augustus said. "You'd think they just discovered teeth.

Ride with an outlaw, die with him," he added. "I admit it's a harsh code. But you rode on the other side long enough to know how it works. I'm sorry you crossed the line, though." Jake's momentary optimism had passed, and he felt tired and despairing. He would have liked a good bed in a whorehouse and a nice night's sleep. "I never seen no line, Gus," he said. "I was just trying to get to Kansas without getting scalped.

I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call.

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

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