“But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son.”

“A man who wouldn't cheat for a poke don't want one bad enough. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae”

“Perhaps it was the word "God" that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah. I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon.”

“Some men just aren't cut for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.”

“Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dumfermline lost at home(p. 83-84)”

“He sees the land of meaning, and one path to it, and the so-called “normal” people traveling swiftly and in comfort to the land; he does not include the shipwrecked people who arrive by devious lonely routes, and the many who dwell in the land in the beginning.”