Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Larry McMurtry

Image
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
Image
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
Image
... people are always turning out to be tougher than I think they are.
Larry McMurtry
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae
Larry McMurtry
Image
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
Image
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
Image
From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.
Larry McMurtry
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.
Larry McMurtry
Image
Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.
Larry McMurtry
Image
Listening to women ain't the fashion in this part of the country.
Larry McMurtry
Image
If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
Larry McMurtry
Image
Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain't much of a crime.
Larry McMurtry
Image
Live through it, Call said. That's all we can do.
Larry McMurtry
Image
True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriend - and he accepts it
Larry McMurtry
Image
The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.
Larry McMurtry
Image
Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.
Larry McMurtry