Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.

and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.

He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.

Free at last, he thought. Great God Almighty, I'm free at last. Then: I believe this is redemption. And it's good, isn't it? Quite good, indeed.

Of course it's heavier, he thought. It's got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.

The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic.

All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one...

work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.

In solitude every fear, every longing, becomes exaggerated.

When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

They're such different things [Townies and Lonesome Dove]. I certainly love them both. Certainly Lonesome Dove would be way hard now, because, I mean, back then I wasn't married.

There is no orthodoxy in walking. It is a land of many paths and no-paths, where every one goes his own and is right.

So, this is a rabbit, I thought. He sort of looks like Chester, only he's got longer ears and a shorter tail. And a motor in his nose.

If you ask me a question like what is your greatest accomplishment, it should be what I’m about to do

I've always loved music and felt connected to it, but was too afraid to explore that avenue.

I learned denial from my mother. I just never confronted things and if anybody did, I just would go crazy.