Glendon Swarthout > Quotes

“I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, I won't be laid-a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same of them.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Shootist

“The weather wouldn't settle down. It would rain cats and dogs, then stop, then drip awhile, then stop while it made up its mind what to do next.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Homesman

“He thought: Oh, I have fed on honey-dew. On wine and whiskey and champagne and the tender white meat of women and fine clothes and the respect of strong men and the fear of weak and the turn of a card and good horses and the crisp of greenbacks and the cool of mornings and all the elbow room that God or man could ask for. I have had high times. But the best times of all were afterward, just afterward, with the gun warm in my hand, the bite of smoke in my nose, the taste of death on my tongue, my heart high in my gullet, the danger past, and then the sweat, suddenly, and the nothingness, and the sweet clean feel of being born.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Shootist

“You shut your door to these poor women," he said so they could hear him, "and you'll answer for it the rest of your lives. You won't sleep. You'll choke on drinks. The food you eat'll block up your bowels and you'll die of your own shit.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Homesman

“And one by one, driven to exhaustion, trapped by fence and horses and bewilderment, under an immaculate sky the mythic creatures died. They died not in mercy, not in the majesty which was their due, but as the least of life, accursed of nature. They died in the dust of insult and the spittle of lead.

There was more here than profaned the eye or ear or nose or heart. There was more here than mere destruction. The American soul itself was involved, its anthropology.

We are born with buffalo blood upon our hands. In the prehistory of us all, the atavistic beasts appear. They graze the plains of our subconscious, they trample through our sleep, and in our dreams we cry out our damnation. We know what we have done, we violent people. We know that no species was created to exterminate another, and the sight of their remnant stirs in us the most profound lust, the most undying hatred, the most inexpiable guilt. A living buffalo mocks us. It has no place or purpose. It is a misbegotten child, a monster with which we cannot live and which we cannot live without. Therefore we slay, and slay again, for while a single buffalo remains, the sin of our fathers, and hence our own, is imperfect. But the slaughter of the buffalo is part of something larger. It is as though the land of Canaan into which we were led was too divine, and until we have done it every violence, until we have despoiled and murdered and dirtied every blessing, until we have erased every reminder of our original rape, until we have washed our hands of the blood of every other, we shall be unappeased. It is as though we are too proud to be beholden to Him. We cannot bear the goodness of God.”
― Glendon Swarthout

“Like blind boys they found each other, and confirmed each other, and through the FM of the flesh they sent to one another impulses of courage and affection.”
― Glendon Swarthout

“I will be thirty years old again in thirty seconds. I will take the best room in the Grand Central or the Orndorff Hotel. I will dine on oysters and palomitas and wash them down with white wine. Then I will go to the Acme or Keating's or the Big Gold Bar and sit down and draw my cards and fill an inside straight and win myself a thousand dollars. Then I will go to the Red Light or the Monte Carlo and dance the floor afire. Then I will go to a parlor house and have them top up a bathtub with French champagne and I will strip and dive into it with a bare-assed blonde and a redhead and an octoroon and the four of us will get completely presoginated and laugh and let long bubbly farts at hell and baptize each other in the name of the Trick, the Prick, and the Piper-Heidsick.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Shootist

“God! You hear me, God? Maybe I don't believe in you, but you damned well better believe in me! J. B. Books! See this gun? I kill with it! You kill, too, but I make a slicker job of it. I kill bad men, you kill good. I have reason, you don't. You are killing me hellish slow, and I do not deserve such treatment. You wrong me, and I will not be wronged. So let us have it out, God. Face me! Be a man and face me now if you have the guts - stand and draw or back off! God damn you, God, throw down on me and kill me now or let me live!”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Shootist

“Tears were a women's guns, to be shed when no other weapon would work.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Homesman

“It was as though the great black bird which had all the night nested the egg of the earth lifted its wings and let light under and then with gigantic thrust of pinion flew upwards and it was day.”
― Glendon Swarthout, They Came To Cordura

“She looked at him bravely now for the first time, at his face, the face from which a child had fled, and drew breath. She rose. Her eyes filled.

She knew.

He took her in his arms and kissed her ardently. Men in their hosts, young and old, innocent and corrupt, had paid her for her favors, but she put her arms about him of her own free will as though to give him what she could in recompense for this, the last gift she guessed, of his manhood.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Shootist

“Everybody has laws he lives by, I expect. I have mine as well."
"What laws?"
Bond Rogers was dismayed. Yet she waited, evidently as curious as her son.
"I will not be laid a hand on. I will not be wronged. I will not stand for an insult. I don't do these things to others. I require the same from them.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Shootist

“I did not know death then, that he is no more to be feared than the man on the black horse. He can be kind, time teaches us. He will lend a hand. Grace is his comrade, memory his foe. In the end he prevails, but triumphs not, so long as we remember.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Melodeon

“If others fell by the wayside, dear women and strong, loved by men, how had she, single and unloved, kept her sanity?”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Homesman

“He had not been in El Paso for years, and they had developed it considerably since then, he'd heard, along the lines of sin and salvation. They had churches and a Republican or two and a smart of banks and a symphony orchestra and five railroads and a lumberyard and the makings of a library. So much for sin. On the side of salvation they had ninety-some saloons, just shy of one for every hundred citizens, although municipal goodyism had moved the gambling rooms out back or upstairs.”
― Glendon Swarthout, The Shootist

“Plus I think it would be good for men to know they have limits.”
― Glendon Swarthout, Where The Boys Are

“Ask the way to the Ladies Room and you’re “processed.” Freedom of choice, my backside.”
― Glendon Swarthout, Where The Boys Are

“TV,” I said, “do you believe in God?” “I believe,” he said, “in Walt Disney.” “You too!” We had clicked.”
― Glendon Swarthout, Where The Boys Are

“What they had done was more immense than they had ever imagined. They quivered. Their toes sang songs. Their hearts beat poetry. Through the tingling gates of their fingertips their souls were liberated. For out on the range, in the last of the moon, leaping and kicking up heels as though at play, the buffalo ran free.”
― Glendon Swarthout, Bless the Beasts and Children

“She'd give him time, then logic. Men's minds were like wooden axles. Now and then they needed grease.”
― Glendon Swarthout

“Here's to the Bedwetters," he said, "the best damn buffalo cowboys in the West.”
― Glendon Swarthout, Bless the Beasts and Children

“I would bet the most perfect peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich ever assembled that there are more well-adjusted people around today than people who aren’t and I think it is damn tragic more of us do not appear in books. 3 symbiosis, n.”
― Glendon Swarthout, Where The Boys Are