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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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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
Sorrow
Unhappiness
Nomads
Demand
Plain
Nomad
Happy
Thick
Landmarks
Lives
Horizon
Horizons
People
Demands
Doings
Boundaries
Dense
Sadness
Crowded
Active
Vague
Sorrowing

More quotes by 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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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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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
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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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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.
Larry McMurtry
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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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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.
Larry McMurtry
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Uva uvum vivendo varia fit
Larry McMurtry
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... people are always turning out to be tougher than I think they are.
Larry McMurtry
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Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.
Larry McMurtry
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You can scare off a lot of cowboys just by looking mean, I guess.
Larry McMurtry
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The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them.
Larry McMurtry
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-she remembered them kindly, for there was a sweetness in boys that didn't last long, once they became men.
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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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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Live through it, Call said. That's all we can do.
Larry McMurtry
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Death and worse happened on the plains.
Larry McMurtry
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Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.
Larry McMurtry