Louis L'Amour Quotes

"She sat across the table looking big-eyed at me and making me uneasy. When a talking woman sits quiet a man had better look at his hole card and keep his horse saddled." - Logan Sackett

as they were, and skillful with weapons, they went about where they liked and did as they pleased, approaching the inevitable time when they would cross the wrong man

We sprung from thin soil, and raised more kin than crops, but we were proud folk...

It is my privilege. It is so written.

So simple a thing, a lighted fire, yet it was a symbol of man's first great step toward civilization, and it was his instinctive return to reality when times of trouble came.

Yet Tanneman was a man grown up to danger and trouble, knowing nothing else, and for the first time he was acting with conscious, deliberate purpose.

I cannot believe in anything else. A man needs heroes. He needs to believe in strength, nobility and courage. Otherwise we become sheep to be herded to the slaughterhouse of death. I believe this. I am a soldier. I try to fight for the right cause. Sometimes it is hard to know.

I have education and once I had position. Now I am nobody, but I am happy.

Folks in the wagon train figured Ma would turn back, but they hadn’t known Ma so long as I had. Once she set her mind to something she wasn’t about to quit.

The trees are aware, and the bushes. The birds and small animals are aware, and they listen, hesitant, suspecting. Awareness of danger is an element of their being. It is like their breathing, like the blood in their veins, and one who lives much with the wilderness become so aware, too... Half of woodcraft is attention, and all of survival.

We were young then, and the West was young, with the land broad and bright before us. We knew, whatever the truth was, that every horse could be ridden, every man whipped, every girl loved.

"You killed Rice Wheeler," he said, "the Panhandle gunman. "He should have stayed in the Panhandle," I said."

To my way of thinking there was nothing finer than to top out on a lonely ridge and sit in my saddle with the wind bringing the smell of pines up from the valley below and the sun glinting off the snow of distant peaks. There was an urge to drink from all the hidden springs, catch fish in the lonely creeks, and leave my tracks on all that far, beautiful country.

deep blue. She was beautiful, not merely pretty, but there was in her eyes the haughty disdain of a queen reprimanding a clumsy subject.

Once, when hitchhiking, I was picked up by a professor from some small college. He noticed a book in my coat pocket, and was curious. It was a Modern Library edition, in the limp bindings they used to have, which sold at the time for 95 cents. This one contained Nietzsche‎‎'s Ecce Homo, and The Birth of Tragedy. The professor was a pedantic man of limited imagination and seemed almost offended that I was reading such a book. Obviously I did not fit some category in which he decided I belonged, and when he dropped me off in town, I suspect he was relived to be rid of me. He kept asking me why I wanted to read such a book. At first, he doubted I was reading it. Where had I heard of Nietzsche‎‎? When I told him I thought it was in the preface to a book on Schopenhauer, he was even more disturbed and probably believed I was lying. Fortunately, there seem to be few of his kind, and my subsequent friendships with university professors have proved exciting, stimulating and fun.