Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist - it doesn’t allow for other cultures.

If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.

It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae

-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.

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.