Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.
Larry McMurtryIf you want one thing too much itโs likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilkโand feisty gentlemen.
Larry McMurtryIt ainโt dying Iโm talking about, itโs living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.โ ~spoken by Augustus McCrae
Larry McMurtryI don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it.
Larry McMurtryCall 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.
Larry McMurtry