Zane Grey > Quotes

“I need this wild life, this freedom.”
― Zane Grey

“Recipe For Greatness - To bear up under loss; To fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; To be victor over anger; To smile when tears are close; To resist disease and evil men and base instincts; To hate hate and to love love; To go on when it would seen good to die; To look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be. That is what any man can do, and be great.”
― Zane Grey

“At the end of the day faith is a funny thing. It turns up when you don't really expect it. Its like one day you realize that the fairy tale may be slightly different than you dreamed. The castle, well, it may not be a castle. And its not so important happy ever after, just that its happy right now. See once in a while, once in a blue moon, people will surprise you , and once in a while people may even take your breath away.”
― Grey

“Instinct may not be greater than reason, but it's a million years older. Don't fight your instincts so hard. If they were not good the God of Creation would not have given them to you.”
― Zane Grey, The Man of the Forest

“Where I was raised a woman's word was law. I ain't quite outgrowed that yet.”
― Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

“Jealousy is an unjust and stifling thing.”
― Zane Grey, The Call of the Canyon

“But what can women do in times of war? They help, they cheer, they inspire, and if their cause is lost they must accept death or worse. Few women have the courage for self-destruction. "To the victor belong the spoils," and women have ever been the spoils of war.”
― Zane Grey, Maude and Miriam: Or, the Fair Crusader

“So that's troublin' you? I reckon it needn't. You see it was this way. I come round the house an' seen that fat party an' heard him talkin' loud. Then he seen me, an' very impolite goes straight for his gun. He oughtn't have tried to throw a gun on me - whatever his reason was. For that's meetin' me on my own grounds. I've seen runnin' molasses that was quicker'n him. Now I didn't know who he was, visitor or friend or relation of yours, though I seen he was a Mormon all over, an' I couldn't get serious about shootin'. So I winged him - put a bullet through his arm as he was pullin' at his gun. An' he droppped the gun there, an' a little blood. I told him he'd introduced himself sufficient, an' to please move out of my vicinity. An' went" - Lassiter”
― Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

“I knew you"d never be American enough to help me reconstruct my life.”
― Zane Grey, The Call of the Canyon

“Love of man for woman - love of woman for man. That's the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.”
― Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

“Her forefathers had been Vikings, savage chieftains who bore no cross and brooked no hindrance to their will.”
― Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage: Filibooks Classics

“When I envied a man's spurs then they were indeed worth coveting.”
― Zane Grey

“I need this wild life, this freedom. To be alive, to look into nature, and so into my soul.”
― Pearl Zane Grey

“He stalked into the room, leaned his long rifle against the mantelpiece and spread out his hands to the fire. He was clad from head to foot in fringed and beaded buckskin, which showed evidence of a long and arduous tramp. It was torn and wet and covered with mud. He was a magnificently made man, six feet in height, and stood straight as an arrow. His wide shoulders, and his muscular, though not heavy, limbs denoted wonderful strength and activity. His long hair, black as a raven's wing, hung far down his shoulders. Presently he turned and the light shone on a remarkable face. So calm and cold and stern it was that it seemed chiselled out of marble. The most striking features were its unusual pallor, and the eyes, which were coal black, and piercing as the dagger's point.”
― Zane Grey, Maude and Miriam: Or, the Fair Crusader

“The awfulness of sudden death and the glory of heaven stunned me! The thing that had been mystery at twilight, lay clear, pure, open in the rosy hue of dawn. Out of the gates of the morning poured a light which glorified the palaces and pyramids, purged and purified the afternoon's inscrutable clefts, swept away the shadows of the mesas, and bathed that broad, deep world of mighty mountains, stately spars of rock, sculptured cathedrals and alabaster terraces in an artist's dream of color. A pearl from heaven had burst, flinging its heart of fire into this chasm. A stream of opal flowed out of the sun, to touch each peak, mesa, dome, parapet, temple and tower, cliff and cleft into the new-born life of another day.

I sat there for a long time and knew that every second the scene changed, yet I could not tell how. I knew I sat high over a hole of broken, splintered, barren mountains; I knew I could see a hundred miles of the length of it, and eighteen miles of the width of it, and a mile of the depth of it, and the shafts and rays of rose light on a million glancing, many-hued surfaces at once; but that knowledge was no help to me. I repeated a lot of meaningless superlatives to myself, and I found words inadequate and superfluous. The spectacle was too elusive and too great. It was life and death, heaven and hell.”
― Zane Grey, The Last of the Plainsmen

“The narrator finds that as a maturing character grows in stature before her friends that she sees less stature while evaluating herself.”
― Zane Grey, The Call of the Canyon

“...dare we live for one another? Dare we be happy?"

"Child, it's our only hope. Let us make our love atone for the hate of our fathers. We have been doomed by their sins. Not that...nor anythin' can keep us apart. I am a slayer of men, but I think God spoke to me today.”
― Zane Grey, Tonto Basin

“The wind blew steadily in from the desert seeping the sand in low, thin sheets. Afternoon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barren waste. There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind, the mourn of wolf. Loneliness came with the night that mantled Beauty Stanton’s grave. Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darkness grew black. On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sand seeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surface of the earth. The desert was still at work. Nature was no respecter of graves. Life was nothing. Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out of the vast blue-black vault of heaven. But there hovered a spirit beside this woman’s last resting-place — a spirit like the night, sad, lonely, silent, mystical, immense.

And as it hovered over hers so it hovered over other nameless graves.

In the eternal workshop of nature, the tenants of these unnamed and forgotten graves would mingle dust of good with dust of evil, and by the divinity of death resolve equally into the elements again.”
― Zane Grey, The U. P. Trail

“Pride would never be her ally.”
― Zane Grey, The Call of the Canyon

“Unhappiness is only a change. Happiness itself is only change. So what does it matter? The great thing is to see life--to understand--to feel--to work--to fight--to endure.”
― Zane Grey, To The Last Man (Annotated): A Western Collection

“I am waiting to plunge down, to shatter and crash, roar and boom, to bury your trail, and close forever the outlet to Deception Pass!”
― Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

“Good God!” cried Hare. “They’re firing on us! They'd shoot a woman!”’

“Has it taken you so long to learn that?”
― Zane Grey, The Heritage of the Desert

“The blindness I mean is blindness that keeps you from seein' the truth.”
― Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

“You and I will never live to see the day that women recover their balance.”
― Zane Grey, The Call of the Canyon

“ Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive. On the one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice, and idealism.”
― Zane Grey, To The Last Man (Annotated): A Western Collection

“Like an arrow sprung from a bow Betty flashed past the Colonel and out on the green. Scarcely ten of the long hundred yards had been covered by her flying feet when a roar of angry shouts and yells warned Betty that the keen-eyed savages saw the bag of powder and now knew they had been deceived by a girl.”
― Zane Grey, Maude and Miriam: Or, the Fair Crusader

“And as he lost that softness of nature, so he lost his fear of men. He would watch for Oldring, biding his time, and he would kill this great black-bearded rustler who had held a girl in bondage, who had used her to his infamous ends.”
― Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

“An awful sense of her deadness, of her soul-blighting selfishness, began to dawn upon her as something monstrous out of dim, gray obscurity.”
― Zane Grey, To The Last Man (Annotated): A Western Collection

“He came at length to realize that the desert was a teacher. He did not realize all that he had learned, but he was a different man. And when he decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow, sure call to the primal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert, as much as he had experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the whole scale of a man’s values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him. More of desert experience, Gale believed, would be too much for intellect. The desert did not breed civilized man, and that made Gale ponder over a strange thought: after all, was the civilized man inferior to the savage?”
― Zane Grey, Desert Gold

“Socialism reached into her mind, to be rejected. She had never understood it clearly, but it seemed to her a state of mind where dissatisfied men and women wanted to share what harder working or more gifted people possessed.”
― Zane Grey, To The Last Man (Annotated): A Western Collection