Westerns Quotes

“That man, John Sampson, says he loves me, Max. There is no reason to fight any more. Or to hate. -I showed him I love him back. I haven’t told him yet, but I will. With all my heart.”
― Donald Montano, Drink Deep from the Well of Good Intentions

“Who stomped on you? You don’t look like the type to take a beating lightly.”
― Donald Montano, Drink Deep From the Well of Good Intentions

“It’s always a game, isn’t it, Rand? That’s who we are. Two improbable people playing a game. But I already told you, -not tonight.”
― Donald Montano, Drink Deep from the Well of Good Intentions

“Zlata Dromenko was a stout Cossack about my height with a thick single eyebrow giving her a serious, severe look. I found out she’d been a mail-order bride who came over from Ukraine to marry a local farmer, a Russian immigrant. He died, though, and now Mrs. Dromenko worked in the hospital bullying patients like me. I called her “Hun,” because she made me think of Attila. I was curious as to how Mr. Dromenko died but was afraid to ask.”
― Phil Truman, Dire Wolf of the Quapaw: a Jubal Smoak Mystery

“Danny’s brows furrowed with another scowl. “You’re so goddamn obstinate, Kate, so fuckin’ selfish. You don’t give a shit ‘bout how I feel or ‘bout how much it torments me.”
“Yes, I do,” she objected, her throat thick despite her anger. “That’s why our ways must part for a while. Because we’re both suffering. We need to be apart from each other, Danny, don’t you see?”
“You need to be apart, damn ya,” he growled, clenching his fists. “You needa get rid of me ‘cause ya don’t wanna be reminded of how ya were toyin’ with me. So your conscience won’t haunt ya, tellin’ ya that it was wrong to take advantage of my feelings as long as ya needed me.”
Katherine let out an outraged gasp.
“I never took advantage of you or toyed with you—ever! I’ve seen you as my brother. I didn’t know your feelings for me went deeper.”
Danny huffed a hard, sardonic laugh, and for a moment she felt strongly reminded of Joe.
“Don’t play innocent with me, Kate! You knew exactly what ya were doin’. All that banterin’, your enchanting smiles—. You’re a grown woman, not an inexperienced girl. You already had yasself a husband, ya know the deal.”
― Melanie Nova, The Avant-gardiste: Into the West

“God help me, I’m gonna make sure we get out of this alive and I’m going to kill that son of a bitch...I’m gonna make him wish he never stepped foot in this town” -Emerson Shaw”
― Justin Bienvenue, A Bloody Bloody Mess In the Wild Wild West

“The doctor said the cold probably kept him from bleeding to death, but the body of his mother and the buffalo robe stayed him from freezing. It was a miracle he survived either, bleeding or freezing to death.”
― Phil Truman, Dire Wolf of the Quapaw: a Jubal Smoak Mystery

“His awareness of this life would ultimately become but a dream to him--a series of fading images and memories and feelings that he would not be able to take with him. His entire life would become just like all the rest of the dreams he'd already forgotten.”
― Eric A. Reynolds, The Wild Dead West: Liberation of the Left-Behind, Pt. I

“The strangest thing about taking another man’s life isn’t really just about the whole moral dilemma of it all, so much as it is about the unmeasurable weight that comes with the responsibility of it. To be the one that robs another man of everything that he’s ever had. Everything he’s ever thought of or dreamed of or has ever known. To steal his memories and his passions and all his potential. And not only did I take him from this world, I had the audacity to take him from everyone that’d ever known and cared for him.”
― Eric A. Reynolds, The Wild Dead West: Liberation of the Left-Behind, Pt. I

“You're a smart -mouthed son of a bitch.”
― Frederick Bean

“Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed”
― Paulette Jiles, News of the World

“Life is nuts, and then you die" ~ Keith R. Ball”
― Keith Randall Ball, Bandit's Cantina

“Life is nuts, and then you die" ~ Keith Randall Ball”
― Keith Randall Ball, Bandit's Cantina

“JAKE DOVER: "The important thing was to be alive at the end; and in this respect, the Yankee and your father were both victors. And in war, or in just plain old day-to-day living, the important thing is to win—not how you win.”
JOHNNY SHAW: “No, sir. I don’t believe that, Mr. Dover.”
JAKE DOVER: “Don’t start jumping to any quick decisions yet; I’ve got more to say. When I get through talking, you can do as you please. And I don’t care what you decide to do. You’ll find that not caring balances off caring too much, when it comes to survival in this world.”
― Charles Willeford, The Difference

“Death faces every man. What makes a man is how he faces death.”
― Aaron C Rhodes, American Cowboys

“Live by Grace; Answer to Justice”
― Grace Justice Evans, The STRONG Shall Survive

“A war was coming to Heaven. And he would meet their enemy before they ever made it to the gates.”
― Natalie Acres, When Heaven Looks Like a Cowboy: A Serialized Western Contemporary Romance

“Is it over?” Boone asked.
Walker slowly shook his head. “No, brother. I’m afraid it’s just beginning.”
― Natalie Acres, When Heaven Looks Like a Cowboy: A Serialized Western Contemporary Romance

“Whatever the reason for their choices, too many country men saw the best years of their
lives melt with the ice cubes in the bottom of an empty whiskey glass.”
― Mark E. Miller

“Whatever the reason for their choices, too many country men saw the best years of their lives
melt with the ice cubes in the bottom of an empty whiskey glass.”
― Mark E. Miller

“Whatever the reason for their choices, too many country men saw the best years of their lives melt with the ice cubes in the bottom of an empty whiskey glass.”
― Mark E. Miller

“Whatever the reason for their choices, too many country men saw the best years of their lives melt with the ice cubes in the bottom of an empty whiskey glass.”
― Mark E. Miller, A Sometimes Paradise: Reflections on Life in a Wyoming Ranch Family

“...perhaps the Great American Desert's importance to the Western genre derives from the nineteenth-century view of the arid West as the natural refuge of Indians and, by extension, of all outlaws. The agrarian ideal, with its roots in Rousseau's thought, defined civilisation as arising from the agricultural life, so the migratory Indians - often compared in nineteent-century writings to Tartars and Bedouin - were, by reason of their socioeconomic organisation, outside the pale of civilised society and the area in which they moved was regarded as fit only for outlaws. It is as a milieu within which men outside civilised, agrarian society resolve their tensions, both personal and social, that the Western has used the myth of the Great American Desert, as in Riders of Death Valley (Forde Beebe and Ray Taylor, 1941), The Last Wagon (Delmer Daves, 1956), The Law and Jake Wade (John Sturges, 1958) and the Boetticher cycle.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, A Quarterly Magazine, No. 4, October 1969

“It seems fitting, however, that the single Western film which most unambiguously endorses the agrarian ideal, The Covered Wagon, should contain one of the cinema screen's most graphic attacks on Industrialism. The film's intertitles inform viewers that one of the most formidable hazards facing the character of Wingate (Charles Stanton Ogle), the leader of the wagon train, is greed arising from the California gold strike of 1849. Several pioneers opt to dig gold in California rather than plow land in Oregon. In a visual composition symbollically resonant with the importance and irrevocability of that choice, the wagon train divides, one part going north and the other south, while visible in the foreground lie the discarded plows of those who have foresaken the agrarian ideal. These shots from a silent Western summarise a major split in the American psyche.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“You see, Ralph Turner and Victor Irish grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, listening to radio shows and watching Westerns in the theater. Growing up, they often played Cowboys and Indians in the fields and forests surrounding their homes. Like most people at the time, they had a Hollywood notion of Native American culture, which they used to try and visualize some kind of indigenous society that would produce copper tools and jewelry. They imagined the technical skill, the mines, and the workers that come with a metalworking society, like their own. However, the portrayal of Native Americans in the Westerns made it di^icult for them to imagine that Native American societies could have achieved this level of expertise.
Having a hard time picturing a Native American using copper, Ralph half-jokingly says, "Maybe the Vikings came to Wisconsin before Columbus?" while shrugging his shoulders.”
― David Pompeani, Great Water: The Lost Mines of Lake Superior

“Before the end of the day there will take place what became known as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral … All Ike Clanton needed, and had really been seeking all morning, was an audience. He launched into a soliloquy: “You fellows haven’t given me any show at all. You’ve treated me like a dog. Fight is my racket, and all I want is four feet of ground. If you fellows had been a second later, I would have furnished a coroner’s inquest for the town. I will get even with all of you for this. If I had a six-shooter now, I would make a fight with all of you.”
― Tom Clavin, Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell

“When he passed on from this place, would his entire life become just like all the rest of the dreams that he'd already forgotten?”
― Eric A. Reynolds, The Wild Dead West: Liberation of the Left-Behind, Pt. I

“Tell me, my cosmic cowboy. Where did you go this time?”
― Eric A. Reynolds, The Wild Dead West: Liberation of the Left-Behind, Pt. I

“An artist's work is only as meaningful as his suffering is deep.”
― Eric A. Reynolds, The Wild Dead West: Liberation of the Left-Behind, Pt. I

“See, you’re either going to die soon, or someone will come by and save your life. And so it’s here, right now, that you’re the most alive. Isn’t that wonderful?” - The Fox and the Snipe”
― Sean Thomas McDonnell, Beneath the Valley Oak