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Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.

Larry McMurtry

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Larry McMurtry
Age: 84 †
Born: 1936
Born: June 3
Died: 2021
Died: March 25
Author
Businessperson
Essayist
Historian
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Archer City
Texas
McMurtry
Larry
Larry Jeff McMurtry
Dove
River
Yesterday
Rivers
Gone
Back

More quotes by Larry McMurtry

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I hate rude behavior in a man,' he explained in his quiet, unassuming drawl. 'I won't tolerate it.' He politely tipped his hat, and rode away.
Larry McMurtry
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WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.
Larry McMurtry
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Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.
Larry McMurtry
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The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings -- crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few.
Larry McMurtry
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Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.
Larry McMurtry
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If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.
Larry McMurtry
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I don't do well with changes in my routine. I read at least three newspapers a day, for example. I'm frustrated if for some reason I can't get ahold of all three.
Larry McMurtry
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You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
Larry McMurtry
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It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.
Larry McMurtry
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Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.
Larry McMurtry
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Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked.
Larry McMurtry
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A man who wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough. --Augustus Gus McCrae
Larry McMurtry
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No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.
Larry McMurtry
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Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.
Larry McMurtry
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Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams
Larry McMurtry
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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.
Larry McMurtry
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Uva uvum vivendo varia fit
Larry McMurtry
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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 McMurtry
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For the past several centuries the bonding power of the family dinner table has been one of the few constants, and now it's binding no more. The potency of the media is now stronger than that of the family. The wonder is that families still exist at all, since the forces of modern life mainly all pull people away from a family centered way of life.
Larry McMurtry
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The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
Larry McMurtry