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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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If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
Larry McMurtry
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Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.
Larry McMurtry
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The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.
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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Death and worse happened on the plains.
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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Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
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
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Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams
Larry McMurtry
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Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.
Larry McMurtry
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A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.
Larry McMurtry
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Uva uvum vivendo varia fit
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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Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.
Larry McMurtry
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Live through it, Call said. That's all we can do.
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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I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.
Larry McMurtry
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Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country.
Larry McMurtry
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Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.
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