We Sackett boys never killed anything we didn’t need to eat unless it was coming at us. A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
Quit crabbing,” Bert said mildly. “We’re here now, and we’ve got to like it.
Many a small man is considered good while he remains small, but let power come to him, and he becomes a raging fury.
The savage is never far from the surface in any of us, but because we know he is there we fight it down.
Shut up!” Joe’s tone was ugly. “If you ain’t willing to try, you can go to hell.
The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers.
How lonely were these silent hills! How reaching out for the sounds of men, for I believe a land needs people to nurse its flesh and bring from it the goodness of crops.
You stick with him, no matter what. It’s all he’ll ever have, what you can give him.
If one has a book, Mr. Boone, One is never alone. They will talk to you when you want to listen, and when you tire of what they are saying, you just close the book. It will be waiting for you when you come back to it.
When the raw, harsh liquor had cut the dust from his throat he looked up at a nearby.
I will go with you, and when you make your camp, I will cook your meat, and when you wish to sleep, I will prepare your bed. Where you go, I will go.
A dead man they could leave, but a wounded man they must care for.
Courage and bravery are words too often used, too little considered. It is one thing to speak them, another thing to live them.
The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other.
I think the greatest gift anyone can give to another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning.
Life, he decided, was never a question of accumulating material things, nor in the struggle for reputation, but in the widening and deepening of perception, increasing the sensitivity of the faculties, of an awareness of the world in which one lives.
Laws are made to free people, not to bind them.
To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder. Yet I had faith in the intentions of my countrymen, no matter how far they might at times stray from those intentions.
Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You.
It is not enough to do, one must also become.
The blood of good men makes the earth rich.