Home > Work > Streets of Laredo (Lonesome Dove #2)
1 " This is a damn useless conversation. Goodbye. (Charles Goodnight to Woodrow Call) "
― Larry McMurtry , Streets of Laredo (Lonesome Dove #2)
2 " She didn’t know what to do with the severed leg. She had cut it off, but she didn’t want to touch it or even look at it. "
3 " It seemed to him the highest principle, loyalty. He preferred it to honor. He had never been exactly sure what men meant when they spoke of their honor, though it had been a popular word during the time of the War. He was sure, though, what he meant when he spoke of loyalty. A man didn’t desert his comrades, his troop, his leader. If he did he was, in Call’s book, worthless. "
4 " Not too many men, in his experience, had achieved a great thing, even one. Very few ever achieved more than one, he knew. "
5 " Still, he was a salaried man. Even though Katie, who had been a good wife, was dead, he was not his own master. "
6 " He was just a husband and a salaried man. Choice didn’t play any part in his life. "
7 " There was no degree of competence that would assure anyone of survival, and no scale that would tell a commander which man would live and which man would die. "
8 " It was a great annoyance to Billy that because of a long shit and a short nap he had lost his horse. But that was the truth of it and there was nothing he could do but limp along. "
9 " 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. "
10 " He doesn't talk much, though," she added. "I don't care whether he talks or not," Lorena said. I wouldn't marry a man just for conversation. I'd rather read and having to know how than listen to some man talk. "
11 " Yet here she was, not with Clara in a theater or a nice hotel in London, but on a bleak prairie, with not even one house within a hundred miles, caring for an old killer who wanted her to cut his ruined leg off so he could get well and kill again. She had studied and educated herself, but she had not escaped. "
12 " It’s not the end of the world, Pea. Just pick up and keep going. "
13 " Men were odd. One day they were hard, far too hard; the next day they were soft, far too soft. They were like porcupines: prickly on the outside, but with soft bellies. "
14 " Gus knew himself. He knew how he wanted to be, and he had chosen in the critical hour not to accept being less. "
15 " The bad things that had happened to her had not killed her. They had not even killed the laughter in her. "
