Louis L'Amour
89 quotes
Biography
Louis Dearborn L'Amour was an American novelist and short story writer. His books consisted primarily of Western novels, though he called his work "frontier stories".
"Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on."
"Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you."
"I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen."
"Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself."
"Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost."
"Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value."
"Personally, I do not believe the human mind has any limits but those we impose ourselves."
"Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance."
"Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember."
"Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential. One has only so much time in this world, so devote it to the work and the people most important to you, to those you love and things that matter. One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn't really like, or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else."
"Characters have a way of taking on a life on their own, expressing themselves in the simple philosophy of their times, and expressing beliefs acquired through living, working, and being. Once characters are established, they become their own persons and the ideas of the characters are such ideas as they might have acquired in the circumstances of their daily existence."
"He had seen Hyle shoot, and he had seen only one man he thought was as good ... just one. He'd seen Con Vallian down in the Bald Knob country that time, and Con was quick. He was almighty quick at a time when a man was either quick or he was dead."
"Out here you better have a gun, and a gun in the wagon ain't good for nothin'. I believe what the old Quaker said,"Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.""
"I sat very still, as befitted a small boy among strangers, staring wide-eyed into a world I did not know. I was six years old and my father was dying."
"Many people know how to get money, but few know how to keep it. Wise investments are always based on information, Johannes, so the more you know, the better."
"What kind of scholar was I? Or was I a scholar at all? My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think."
"I am merely a seeker after knowledge, taking the world for my province, for it seems all knowledge is interrelated, and each science is dependent to some extent on the others. We study the stars that we may know more about our earth, and herbs that we may know medicine better."
"This was the beginning of something, yet I had ventured back into a world from which I had come and found it an alien world of which I was no longer a part. In a sense I had always been alien. My Druidic training had taken me deep into a past that held more than the present, and along with it had been my father’s accounts, returning home after voyages, of a world beyond our shores. I had mingled with the men of his crews, almost half of which had come from other lands, other cultures, until I had become a stranger in my own land."
"It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time."
"A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time."
"Louis gives us a lesson — too seldom offered by academic or professional critics — in open-mindedness and literary charity. And he encourages us, too, to become Wandering Readers, joining his search for the joys and surprises in the pages of books."
"No memory is ever alone it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations."
"Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him."
"No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process."
"For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time."