Louis L'Amour

“Destarte! How musical! What does it mean?" "You can't say it except in Mescalero. It means Morning, but that isn't what it means, either. Indian words are more than just that. They also mean the feel and the sound of the name. It means like Crack of Dawn, the first bronze light that makes the buttes stand out against the gray desert. It means the first sound you hear of a brook curling over some rocks-some trout jumping and a beaver crooning. It means the sound a stallion makes when he whistles at some mares just as the first puff of wind kicks up at daybreak. "It means like you get up in the first light and you and her go out of the wickiup, where it smells smoky and private and just you and her, and kind of safe with just the two of you there, and you stand outside and smell the first bite of the wind coming down from the high divide and promising the first snowfall. Well, you just can't say what it means in English. Anyway, that was her name. Destarte.”

“Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen”

“I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.”

“No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.”

“Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else.”

“There are shadows for the shadows of things, as a reflection seen in a mirror of a mirror. We know there are circles within circles and dimensions beyond dimension. Reality is itself a shadow, only an appearance accepted by those whose eyes shun what might lie beyond.”

“A man marries by accident, a woman by design.”

“To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.”

“What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life. ”

“He never knew when he was whipped ... So he never was.......”

“A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realists, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very old or very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads.”

“Raindrops felt his cheeks with blind, questing fingers...the black trunks of the trees were like iron bars against the gray of gathering pools." Radigan”

“After a few days, I mused, I would have no trouble. Whoever heard of a revolution of fat men?”

“I am somebody. I am me. And I don't need anybody to make me somebody.”

“Out here you better have a gun, and a gun in the wagon ain't good for nothin'. I believe what the old Quaker said, 'Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.”

“Hardy had learned in a hard school, where the tests are given by savage Indians, by bitter cold, by hunger. These were tests where the result was not just a bad mark if one failed. The result was a starved or frozen body somewhere, forgotten in the wilderness.”

“A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.”

“It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

“Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.”

“Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.”

“A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”

“The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.”

“Love is a moment of stillness that sometimes a word can shatter to pieces. Or love can be a thing that endures, a rich, deep current flowing unending through the years.”

“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”

“Today is all we have, tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.”

“When you go to a country, you must learn how to say two things: how to ask for food, and to tell a woman that you love her. Of these the second is more important, for if you tell a woman you love her, she will certainly feed you.”

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning. ”

“The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.”

“A little rest and meditation often saves a lot of riding over rough country.”

“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast,and you miss all you are traveling for.”

“No one can "get" an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.”

“Like I say, I killed a man or two but I'm no thief. My ma raised me better.”

“One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!”

“. . . What do you wish to be? What would you like to become?”I did not know, and I told her so, but the question worried me. Should I know?“There is time,” she said, “but the sooner you know, the sooner you can plan. To have a goal is the important thing, and to work toward it. Then, if you decide you wish to do something different, you will at least have been moving, you will have been going somewhere, you will have been learning.”

“I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.”

“Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.”

“When at the typewriter I am no longer where I site but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed.”

“I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.”

“A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”

“Have faith in God but keep your powder dry.”