Robert Ruark > Quotes

“Any time a boy is ready to learn about guns is the time he’s ready, no matter how young he is, and you can’t start too young to learn how to be careful.”
― Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy

“You might as well learn that a man who catches fish or shoots game has got to make it fit to eat before he sleeps. Otherwise it’s all a waste and a sin to take it if you can’t use it.”
― Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy

“Time just seems to fly away for a boy. That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and you ain’t a boy any longer.”
― Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy

“When we take away from a man his traditional way of life, his customs, hi religion, we had better make certain to replace it with
SOMETHING OF VALUE”
― Robert Ruark, Something of Value

“If they keep exposing you to education, you might even realize some day that man becomes immortal only in what he writes on paper, or hacks into rock, or slabbers onto a canvas, or pulls out of a piano.”
― Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy

“The Old Man just claimed that the stature of the man was measured by how much he could smile when fate was beating him over the head with a stick.”
― Robert Ruark, The Old Man's Boy Grows Older

“I reckon the years between forty and sixty are the best a man's apt to put in. He can do dang near anything as good as he could when he was a youngster, and what he can't jump over he's smart enough to walk around.”
― Robert Ruark, Old Man's Boy Grows Up

“A man and a gun and a star and a beast are still ponderable in a world of imponderables. The essence of the simple ponderable is man’s potential ability to slay a lion. It is an opportunity that comes to few, but the urge is always present. Never forget that man is not a dehydrated nellie under his silly striped pants. He is a direct descendant of the hairy fellow who tore his meat raw from the pulsing flanks of just-slain beasts and who wiped his greasy fingers on his thighs if he bothered to wipe them at all. I wiped my greasy fingers on my thigh for practice. This is the only deeply rooted reason I can produce for the almost universal”
― Robert Ruark, Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

“When man made fire, he lifted himself up, over, and above the animals. Fire is actually too good for people. Let us sit in front of one of these tiny, gleaming blazes and drink a little gin.”
― Robert Ruark, Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

“you pinned me right down to it,” the Old Man said, “I don’t like nothing very much but a hot fire and a warm bed and a quiet woman to fetch me my food. I can generally manage the first two, but I been looking constantly for the basic ingredient of the third. Quiet, I mean.”
― Robert Ruark, Old Man's Boy Grows Up

“I got to thinking that maybe this was what God had in mind when He invented religion, instead of all the don’t and must-nots and sins and confessions of sins. I got to thinking about all the big churches I had been in, including those in Rome, and how none of them could possibly compare with this place, with its brilliant birds and its soothing sounds of intense life all around and the feeling of ineffable peace and goodwill so that not even man would be capable of behaving very badly in such a place. I thought that this was maybe the kind of place the Lord would come to sit in and get His strength back after a hard day’s work trying to straighten out mankind. Certainly He wouldn’t go inside a church. If the Lord was tired, He would be uneasy inside a church.”
― Robert Ruark, Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

“A brave man is frightened three times by a lion: when he first sees its track, when he first hears its roar, and when he first sees the lion in the flesh”
― Robert Ruark, The Old Man's Boy Grows Older

“At least if you can laugh instead of cry the troubles will either kill you or go away, and it is a bit better to die laughing than to die crying.”
― Robert Ruark, Old Man's Boy Grows Up

“Rich," the Old Man said dreamily, "is not baying after what you can't have. Rich is having the time to do what you want to do. Rich is a little whisky to drink and some food to eat and a roof over your head and a fish pole and a boat and a gun and a dollar for a box of shells. Rich is not owing any money to anybody, and not spending what you haven't got.”
― Robert Ruark, The Old Man's Boy Grows Older

“A brave man is frightened three times by a lion: when he first sees its track, when he first hears its roar, and when he first sees the lion in the flesh.”
― Robert Ruark, Old Man's Boy Grows Up

“he reckoned Somebody, no matter what name you called Him, was responsible for sun, moon, mountains, sea, stars, heat, cold, seasons, animals, birds, fish, and food—”even small boys, although that may have been a basic mistake”—and whether you called him God, Allah, Jehovah, or Mug-Mug didn’t make much difference as long as you believed in Him.”
― Robert Ruark, Old Man's Boy Grows Up

“To understand Africa you must understand a basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we civilised people have encountered in two centuries”
― Robert Ruark, Something of Value