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

Of all the women he knew, she had meant the most; and was the one person in his life he felt he had missed, in some ways.

— Larry McMurtry

Once started, love couldn't easily be stopped.

— Larry McMurtry

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy, and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.

— Larry McMurtry

One day Augustus asked Newt to ride along with him, much to Newt’s surprise. In the morning they saw a grizzly, but the bear was far upwind and didn’t scent them. It was a beautiful day—no clouds in the sky. Augustus rode with his big rifle propped across the saddle—he was in the highest of spirits. They rode ahead of the herd some fifteen miles or more, and yet when they stopped to look back they could still see the cattle, tiny black dots in the middle of the plain, with the southern horizon still far behind them.

— Larry McMurtry

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one's youth.

— Larry McMurtry

She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met a woman.

— Larry McMurtry

She sighed. Men were a pain.

— Larry McMurtry

The best to do with a death was to move on from it.

— Larry McMurtry

The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.

— Larry McMurtry