The things a man will wish for are harder to leave behind than all his wants...
Remember that, son. The dogs bark, but the wagons go on their way, and if you’re going someplace you haven’t time to bother with barking dogs.
In Bowdrie’s limited vocabulary, to be responsible was the most important word.
It has often been said that we have but one life to live; that is nonsense. If one reads fiction he or she can live a thousand lives, in many parts of the world or in outer space.
If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?
But a long time ago I made me a rule: I let people do what they want to do.
The whole town was like that. Probably there weren’t three men in town who had not used guns, and used them a lot.
Never let them know how you feel or what you are thinking. If they know how you feel they know how to hurt you, and if they hurt you once, they will try again.
It means little to anybody but us. We set store by kinfolk. We’ve our troubles from time to time, but when one of us is in danger, there’ll be help from any who are around.
He had no love for sleeping inside and wanted his horse near him. There was something about lying under the stars that was conducive to thought, and he had some thinking to do.
What we did not possess we had to make for ourselves or learn to do without, but the little I learned helped me to build a defense against the change that time would surely bring, to teach me that to live was to change, and that change was the one irrevocable law. Nothing remained the same.
No telling what those men wanted... but in these times there were white men with bloodier hands than any Indian...
As the days went by, I began to see this girl I had married was even more than I had suspected and in every way.
I never saw a man get superior so fast.
It was a sea of horns above the red, brown, brindle, and white-splashed backs of the steers.
My friend, there is a Hell. It’s when a man has a family to support, has his health and is ready to work, and there is no work to do. When he stands with empty hands and sees his children going hungry, his wife without the things to do with. I hope you never have to try it.
We are a people of the frontier, born to it, bred to it, looking always toward it. And when the frontiers of our own land are gone, when we have drawn them all into an ordered world, then we must seek other frontiers, the frontiers of the mind beyond which men have not gone, the frontiers that lie out beyond the stars, the frontiers that lie within our own selves, that hold us back from what we would do, what we would achieve.
I never liked the term mystic as applied to someone or a way of thought. It covers something very profound and an awful lot of nonsense passes as profound thought.
The point is,” Frank said, “that we’re here. No use talking about what should have been.
Must one seek something? I seek to be seeking, as I learn to be learning. Each book is an adventure as is each day’s horizon.