“For that pony had got tangled up in the cowboy's heartstrings a heap more than that cowboy wanted to let on, even to himself. He couldn't get away from how he missed him.”

“There was so much life wrapped up in that pony's hide that it was mighty hard for him to settle down and behave...he sometimes had to bust out and do things that wasn't at all proper...”

“The poor (horse) had sure got a reason to be mean, and I guess he's at the point where he figgers no human is his friend any more.”

“Obviously, he needed to kill Bubba, but how? The man was a trained prison guard twice his size. The tax auditors had been easy. Mr. Ethics had slapped them to death with their own attaché cases. And even then, his neighbours had chipped in to help him hide the bodies. "A tax auditor, you say? No problem. Let me get my spade.”

“Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything had changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin's right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.”

“Let him ride a horse. He's a cowboy ain't he?”

“I loved him, more than anything else in the world and that when he was away it was hard to breath and that I couldn't go through a single second without thinking about him.”