I wished I had a book. It had been so long since I had read. Could a man forget how to read?
He spoke softly to the horse, and its ears twitched. It was funny about a horse—how much they would give for gentleness. There was no animal that responded so readily to good treatment, and no other animal would run itself to death for a man—except, occasionally, a dog.
Would you fight a woman, Mr. Radigan? I thought Western men more gallant. There was no yielding in Radigan. When you opened the ball, he replied, you called the tune.
He who hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprise.
Many a small man is considered good while he remains small, but let power come to him, and he becomes a raging fury.
But in the West few men would risk bothering a woman. It was the one thing the frontier would not accept - Kilkenny.
Quit crabbing, Bert said mildly. We're here now, and we've got to like it.
A move well planned is a move half-done, and I tried to think through every phase.
A walking man will kick the grass down in the direction of travel, but a horse with the swinging movements of its hoofs will knock the grass down so it points in the direction from which it has come.
Nothing in my nature permitted me to trust to fortune, for it was my belief that good luck comes to those who work hard and plan well. So.
Personally, I do not believe the human mind has any limits but those we impose ourselves.
Not even a marshrat will trust itself to one hole only, so always have an escape route, and more than one, if it can be.
Hardy had learned in a hard school, where the tests are given by savage Indians, by bitter cold, by hunger. These were tests where the result was not just a bad mark if one failed. The result was a starved or frozen body somewhere, forgotten in the wilderness.
This is our bed. Keep it clean.
Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.
The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.
Oft times a blade across the room beyond the reach of a hand means that death is nearer.
The object of battle was the destruction of the enemy's capacity to resist.
We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.
Hutch looked at him.
A journey is time suspended.
I don't have anybody available to send up there to help you out. We're kind of up to our elbows in enemy sympathizers right now in Los Angeles.
What do you wish to be? What would you like to become?
If he was going to get out of this hole, he would have to do it by his own efforts. One.
We sprung from thin soil, and raised more kin than crops, but we were proud folk...
We mountain boys were all walkers. Mostly it was the fastest way to get ary place back in the hills, for often a boy could cross a mountain afoot where no horse could go . . .
A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.
It is this by which we measure a man, by what he does with his life, by what he creates to leave behind. —Louis L'Amour.
He had fought for a principle, and because it was his nature to fight.
The point is, Frank said, that we're here. No use talking about what should have been.
He is a fool who will descend into a well on another man's rope.
Don't go for that gun, I said quietly. I want you tried in a court of law, not dead on this floor.
Nobody lives long low-rating an enemy. You've got to give the other fellow credit for having as much savvy as you have, and maybe a little more.
We accepted all people as they were and trusted nobody until they had proved themselves trustworthy.
He wastes no time yet is never hurried.
To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.
To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.
We grew up to expect hardship and war. But a woman? I'd seen them follow their men to war, seen them seeking over battlefields to find their lonely dead, or the wounded who would die but for them. I have seen a woman pick up a man and carry him off the field to a place where he might have care.
People have a greater tolerance for evil than for violence. If crooked gamboling, thieving and robing are covered over folks will tolerate it longer than out right violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.
There was much talk of sermons, also, and I gathered from this, as well as what Yance had told me, that sermons had much to do with shaping of thinking. There were a stiff-necked, proud folk, not easily persuaded to any course not dictated by conscience, yet conscience could be a poor guide if accompanied by lack of knowledge.
When one lies awake in the night one thinks of many things, and I thought now.
A family is a place where a body can share the no-account things, can talk of the little matters important only to ourselves, where we can laugh and cry and tell of the day-by-day happenings and then forget them.
Her eyes went again to the man in black. He had removed his hat when he seated himself and she noticed that his hair was black and curly. He was a lean, powerfully built man, probably larger than he looked while seated. Her eyes trailed again to the bandage. You…you've hurt yourself! she exclaimed. Your shoulder! Embarrassed.
All men wish to be captains, but few men wish to shoulder the burden of decision, and in coming here with these others, I had staked a claim that I must wall against misfortune.
Folks can't seem to realize that it isn't a smooth talker we need in there but a steady man, a man with judgement. Any medicine-show man can spout words, if they are written for him. It takes no genius to sound well. To act right and at the right time is something else again.
There are folks who can't abide camp-robber jays, but I take to them. Often enough they've been my only company for days at a time, and they surely do get friendly. They'll steal your grub right from under your nose, but who I am to criticize the lifestyle of a bird? He has his ways, I have mine. Like I say, I take to them.
The buzzard could not reason but he knew the patterns that led to food. His entire life was built upon such fragments of knowledge and he knew that where such groups of men rode, death rode with them.
It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could.
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
