Larry Mcmurtry Quotes

“Of course they had heard that the buffalo were being wiped out, but with the memory of the southern herd so vivid, they had hardly credited the news. Discussing it in Lonesome Dove they had decided that the reports must be exaggerated — thinned out, maybe, but not wiped out. Thus the sight of the road of bones stretching out over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel. With those millions of animals gone, and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed.

Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants – of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Do you want me to do anything about them Indians?” Call asked.

“Which Indians?” Augustus asked, wondering what his friend could be talking about. Call’s cheeks looked drawn, as though he hadn’t eaten for days, though he was eating even as he asked the question.

“Those that shot the arrows into you,” Call said.

“Oh, no, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “We won more than our share with the natives. They didn’t invite us here, you know. We got no call to be vengeful. You start that and I’ll spoil your appetite.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“The buffalo will return," Kicking Wolf said. "They have only gone to the north for a while. The buffalo have always returned."

"You are a fool," Buffalo Hump said. "The buffalo won't return, because they are dead. The whites have killed them. When you go north you will only find their bones."

"The whites have killed many, but not all," Kicking Wolf insisted. "They have only gone to the Missouri River to live. When beaten the whites back we have they will return."

But, as he was speaking, Kicking Wolf suddenly lost heart. He realized that Buffalo Hump was right, and that the words he had just spoken were the words of a fool. The Comanches were not beating the whites, and they were not going to beat them. Only their own band and three or four others were still free Comanches. The bands that were free were the bands that could survive on the least, those who would eat small animals and dig roots from the earth. Already the bluecoat soldiers had come back to Texas and begun to fill up the old forts, places they had abandoned while they fought one another. Even if all the free tribes banded together there would not be enough warriors to defeat the bluecoat soldiers. With the buffalo gone so far north, the white soldiers had only to drive them farther and farther into the llano, until they starved or gave up.

"The whites are not foolish," Buffalo Hump said. "They know that it is easier to kill a buffalo than it is to kill one of us. They know that if they kill all the buffalo we will starve – then they won't have to fight us. Those who don't want to starve will have to go where the whites want to put them."

The two men sat in silence for a while. Some young men were racing their horses a little farther down the canyon. Kicking Wolf usually took a keen interest in such contests. He wanted to know which horses were fastest. But today he didn't care. He felt too sad.

"The medicine men are deceiving the young warriors when they tell them the buffalo will return," Buffalo Hump said. "If any buffalo come back they will only be ghost buffalo. Their ghosts might return because they remember these lands. But that will not help us. We cannot eat their ghosts.”
― Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon

“He began to wish that somehow things could have been rounded off a little better. Of course he knew death was no respecter. People just dropped when they dropped, whether they had rounded things off or not.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“The vast plain was beautiful, but it had reduced Pea Eye to a scarred wreck.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Son, this is a sad thing,” Augustus said. “Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good. Don't go attempting vengeance. You’ve got more urgent business… Don't be trying to give back pain for pain.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“I've just served five years in a great war —the only struggle that still interests me is the conflict with the sentence, sir—the English sentence.”
― Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon

“Buffalo Hump wanted to see the ocean because the ocean would always be as it was. Few things could stay forever in the way they were when the spirits made them. Even the great plains of grass, the home of the People, would not be always as it had been. The whites would bring their plows and scar the earth; they would their put cattle on it and the cattle would bring the ugly mesquite trees. The grass that had been high forever would be trampled and torn. The llano would not be always as it had been. The ocean and the stars were eternal, things whose power and mystery were greater than the powers of men.”
― Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon

“Hurry up and get changed, and don't call my daughter a bitch again.'

'No promises,' Lois said. 'You know what she's doing as well as I do, Gene. She doesn't give a damn about Sonny, she just wants to hurt us and get a little attention while she's doing it. What is that but bitchery?”
― Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show

“Hurry up and get changed, and don't call my daughter a bitch again.'

'No promises,' Lois said. 'You know what she's doing as well as I do, Gene. She doesn't give a damn about Sonny, she just wants to hurt us and get a little attention while she's doing it. What is that but bitchery?”
― Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show

“None of it [art] tells you anything new; it merely reminds you of something you already know but forgot you knew. And that's what Larry did." [Bill Wittliff about Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“In interviews, McMurtry frequently mentioned that whenever he wrote a novel now, he paused to consider which young bankable actors could play his characters in a movie, and if he could think of none, he would change his characters to fit Hollywood's realities. Such comments sounded like further attempts to disabuse his readers from clinging to nostalgic notions of the Novel as High Art.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“But I had ceased to be that person; I acted him or impersonated him as best I could, for the benefit of loved ones." [Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“Working on novels, he reaffirmed his belief that nothing important could really be explained; it could only be experienced in the daily clutter of stuff that fiction was so good at cataloguing. [re: Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“The novel offers no startling revelations about how to cope with grief or sadness or aging. It offers what a novel can, a rich, full experience of an individual mind. [re: Larry McMurtry, Duane's Depressed]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life