1923 Quotes

Someday, you’re gonna run this place, and for your son to someday run it too, you got to understand what this ranch’s greatest enemy is. It’s not wolves, or drought, or blizzards, or Texas Fever. It’s other men. Man will choose to take what you’ve built rather than try and build it for himself. Every civilization in this world is built on top of the one they conquered. You go to Rome or Jerusalem or Paris, France and it’s cities stacked on top of towns stacked on top of villages on top of one man’s house built on top of one man’s cave. Wish it wasn’t so, but it is. Your enemies have got to be so terrified that their fear is greater than their greed.[to Jack]

We take what life gives us. It’s all we can do.

People aren’t defined by what happens to them. They’re defined by what they do. More often than not, they’re defined by what they don’t do. What they’re too scared to do.

Men kill with bullets or a noose, which is to say men kill quick. Your fight is with me now. I kill much slower.[to Banner]

Why danger gives men such pleasure I’ll never understand.

When the sun hits your face, I am your shadow. When it finds my back, you are mine. I go where you go. Even if it’s the death of me.[to Spencer]

War’s not living. If insanity was a thing you could touch, that’s what war is. A letter is a window out of that hell for a minute. But it’s a double-edged sword. Missing home and dreaming has killed more soldiers. You want to eat a bullet in battle, you start wishing for a letter.[to Alexandra]

Selling an experience is an infinite resource that costs nothing to create because it already exists.

Schools don’t teach you what happened. They teach you what they want you to believe. And if they can teach you that, you’ll believe anything they tell you.

Mothers can endure anything. A child’s first act on this planet is to tear his mother in two. Rip her apart from the inside. What emerges is a life completely dependent on her. For food, warmth, comfort, protection. The child will speak a language devised solely of wails and murmurs and furrowed brows and the mother understands this language the instant it is spoken. The mother is consumed and driven by a love that is indescribable to those who have not experienced it. It is not the butterflies of infatuation. It is the instinct of love.

Man destroys everything. He has been at war with this world since he first entered it. War with its trees. War with its weather. So is everything else. If it was up to the wolves, it would be wolves and nothing else. Same goes for the bear and the snake and the spider. Trees grow tall to rob sunlight from all beneath it. Nothing coexists. Life is a constant state of battle for survival. And only one thing rings victorious: the world itself. Earth is not a benign rock condemned to endure countless little rapes from its inhabitants. It is a living, evolving, interactive being capable of wiping all existence by the simplest of wobbles on its axis. There have been five mass extinctions on this planet where almost all life was eradicated, its occupiers cleansed from this place. It only stands to reason that a sixth one is coming.

I sure hope you’ll come back. But not like that boy does. Sun don’t rise in the east with him. Rises with you.[to Elizabeth]