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If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

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
Temptation
Considered
Anyone
Common
Butcher
Seems
Resisted
Anything
Undesirable
Always
Butchers
Men
Pacific

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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.
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... people are always turning out to be tougher than I think they are.
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If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.
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Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams
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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.
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A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.
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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.
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Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.
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Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.
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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.
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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.
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Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country.
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Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
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-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.
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I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.
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I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.
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Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.
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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.
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Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library.
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