Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.

Live through it," Call said. "That's all we can do.

I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.

People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.

A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.

I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.