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...

If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.

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...

Watching them, Harmony felt too shaken to take a step. Eddie and Sheba were young; but she herself had become old. Even if she wasn’t particularly old if you just counted years, the fact was...

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...

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over...

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...

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one’s youth.

A man who wouldn’t cheat for a poke don’t want one bad enough. –Augustus “Gus” McCrae

They’re enterprising pigs.

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author’s affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much...

You ride in yesterday talking Montana, and today you’re talking California.

She sighed. Men were a pain.

One day Augustus asked Newt to ride along with him, much to Newt’s surprise. In the morning they saw a grizzly, but the bear was far upwind and didn’t scent them. It was a beautiful...

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...

Are you man enough to try?” she asked.

The crimes the law can understand are not the worst crimes.

Little by little, the look of the land changes by the men we admire.

If we know anything about man, it’s that he’s not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

But the English are different, and they don’t know how to be other than different.

Could any woman live every day with that level of masculinity?

If you mean Miss Austen, I don’t find her particularly romantic,” Tasmin declared. “Can’t say that I care much about the marriage arrangements among the middle classes.”Tasmin Berrybender