Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

You didn't need a college degree to become one of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own.

Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels.

It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the day.

You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them. You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.

Life there was hard and it made people hard.