Oakley Hall

“The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.”

“As one half of our nature seeks to create heroes to worship, the other must ceaselessly attempt to cast them down and discover evidence of feet-of-clay, in order to label them as mere lucky fellows, or as villains-were-the-facts-but-known, and the eminent and great are ground between the millstones of envy, and reduced again to common size.”

“We are a race of tradition-lovers in a new land, of king-reverers in a Republic, of hero-worshipers in a society of mundane get-and-spend. It is a Country and a Time where any bank clerk or common laborer can become a famous outlaw, where an outlaw can in a very short time be sainted in song and story into a Robin Hood, where a Frontier Model Excalibur can be drawn from the block at any gunshop for twenty dollars.”

“Ah,the pure shine of a few moments of heroism, high courage, and derring-do! In its light we genuflect before the Hero, we bask inthe warmth of his Deeds, we tout him, shout him praises, deify him, and, in short, make of him what no mortal could ever be.”

“Is not the semblance of guilt, however slight the tinge, already a corruption?”

“Any man who has got himself set over others and don't have any responsibility to something bigger than him is a son of a bitch.”

“Cussing your daddy when he is crippled so he can't beat your teeth down your throat for it. Well, it is sire and dam in a man like a horse, and no way to get yourself a boy without there is half woman in him.”