"It was a weakness, but he could not bear to disappoint women, even if it was ultimately for their own good."
"It seemed to him there was never much time with women. Before you could look at one twice, you were into an argument, and they were telling you what was going to happen."
"They probably think the sun won't come up unless you're there to allow it."
"Don't be trying to give back pain for pain...You can't get even measures in business like this."
"I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad."
"It was something, what must go through men's mind where women were concerned, to cause them to behave so strangely."
"He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men."
"Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked."
"For most of the hours of the day—and most of the months of the year—the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans."
"WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over."
"Who asked them dern pigs?” he said. “I guess they tracked us,” Augustus said. “They’re enterprising pigs."
"Jake, you’re a dern grasshopper,” Augustus said. “You ride in yesterday talking Montana, and today you’re talking California."
"You should marry me", he said. "I will be good to you. I am not like these men. I have manners. You would see how kind I would be. I would never leave you. You could have an easy life."
"He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men."
"It was something he had always done - moved apart, so he could be alone and think things or a little."
"He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present."
"It's funny, leaving a place, ain't it?" he said. "You never do know when you'll get back."
"Of all the women he knew, she had meant the most; and was the one person in his life he felt he had missed, in some ways."
"It's just that it's fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble."
"The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes."
"She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met a woman."
"You probably drink too much. If you hand me that bottle, I'll reduce your temptations. --Augustus "Gus" McCrae"
"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."
"The best to do with a death was to move on from it."
"I won't tolerate vanity in a man, though I will in a woman."