Great Throughts Treasury

"At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen."

"Being scared can keep a man from getting killed, and often makes a better fighter of him."

"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."

"But that's over, Sackett. Why did you take up for Em Talon? Emily Talon is a Sackett. I don't need no more reason than that."

"Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember."

"Enemies can be an incentive to survive and become someone in spite of them. Enemies can keep you alert and aware."

"Especially he'p you fight your battles. Why, ain't one of them Clinch Mountain Sacketts wouldn't climb a tree to fight a bear."

"Even those who fancy themselves the most progressive will fight against other kinds of progress, for each of us is convinced that our way is the best way."

"Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow."

"Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy."

"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."

"Destarte! How musical! What does it mean? You can't say it except in Mescalero. It means Morning, but that isn't what it means, either. Indian words are more than just that. They also mean the feel and the sound of the name. It means like Crack of Dawn, the first bronze light that makes the buttes stand out against the gray desert. It means the first sound you hear of a brook curling over some rocks-some trout jumping and a beaver crooning. It means the sound a stallion makes when he whistles at some mares just as the first puff of wind kicks up at daybreak. It means like you get up in the first light and you and her go out of the wickiup, where it smells smoky and private and just you and her, and kind of safe with just the two of you there, and you stand outside and smell the first bite of the wind coming down from the high divide and promising the first snowfall. Well, you just can't say what it means in English. Anyway, that was her name. Destarte."

"But in the West few men would risk bothering a woman. It was the one thing the frontier would not accept."

"Charlie Farnum and me we started east for the herd, riding together. When we were a few miles off we started to sing, and we sang a dozen songs before we shut up and left it to the coyotes. That Charlie Farnum had a better voice than me. For that matter, so did the coyotes."

"For you and me, today is all we have; tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality."

"Hardy had learned in a hard school, where the tests are given by savage Indians, by bitter cold, by hunger. These were tests where the result was not just a bad mark if one failed. The result was a starved or frozen body somewhere, forgotten in the wilderness."

"He might never really do what he said, but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go."

"He never knew when he was whipped... so he never was."

"Have faith in God but keep your powder dry."

"I don't believe you know anything about a man like me or a country like this. It takes rough men, Miss Fair, to tame a rough country; rough men, but good men. Your father is in that class. As for you, I don't think you'd measure up, and you'll do well to leave it. You're a hothouse flower, very soft, very appealing and very useless... In the world you are going to, men want pretty useless women. They want toys for their lighter moments, and we have those women out here, too, only we have another name for them. We want women who can make a home, and if need be, handle a rifle."

"I do not think much of ages. People are people. What does it matter how old or young they are? It is a category, and I do not like categories. It is a sort of pigeonhole or a label."

"Hate would destroy him who hated."

"I ate seven eggs, nine strips of bacon and six hot-cakes, and drank five cups of coffee. Tyrel watched me, no smile on his face. Then he looked over at Dru. I'd sooner buy his clothes than feed him, he said."

"Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more."

"I fear there will be no future for those who do not change."

"I have been nothing... but there is tomorrow."

"I have reverence for truth, but I do not know what truth is. I suspect that there are many truths, and therefore, I suspect all who claim to have 'the' truth."

"I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn."

"I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told."

"I love the mountains, and besides, while Regal is laid up, who would hunt for them? You mean you hunt? You? You actually kill things? Yes ma'am. Whatever meat we have is wild meat, shot by me when the boys are away."

"I wonder why it is the man who pleads for mercy never gives it."

"I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant."

"I have to make do with my pick. 'Pick? Arkansas Toothpick. When I said it, I could see he was ignorant. It's a kind of knife."

"I'm like a big old hen. I can't cluck too long about the egg I've just laid because I've got five more inside me pushing to get out."

"In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame."

"Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees."

"It is better to have no emotion when it is work. Do what needs to be done, and do it coolly."

"It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, 'He was a man who didn't believe in violence, He's a good man... and dead."

"I tell them that you're a good man. Me? It was the first time in a long while anybody had said that about Nolan Sackett. Oh, they say, 'He's a good man with a gun,' or 'He's a fair hand with a rope,' or 'He can ride anything wears hair,' but nobody just out and said I was a good man. A man has to avoid that sort of thing. First thing a man knows he's tryin' to live up to it. And then what kind of an outlaw is he?"

"If one of you makes a wrong move I'm going to kill your boss. You ain't got the guts, he said, his tone ugly. Kill him boys. Boss, a slim, wiry man was talking, that's Logan Sackett."

"If man no longer had enemies, he would have to invent them, for his strength only grows through struggle."

"If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier."

"If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined."

"It is not enough to do, one must also become. I wish to be wiser, stronger, better. This-- I held out my hands --this thing that is me is incomplete. It is only the raw material with which I have to work. I want to make it better than I received it."

"Like I say, I killed a man or two but I'm no thief. My ma raised me better."

"Logan is a man who takes hanging right serious"

"Logan Sackett wasn't a bad man in the eastern sense. In the west a bad man was not necessarily an evil man or an outlaw he was a bad man to tangle with. He was a man to leave alone, and such a one was Logan However, I'll bank on one thing. He never done anything mean or small in his life."

"Man needs so little... yet he begins wanting so much."

"Men strive for peace, but it is their enemies that give them strength, and I think if man no longer had enemies, he would have to invent them, for his strength only grows from struggle."

"Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever."