Mark Warren > Quotes

“I was rich, for there was nothing else that I needed or wanted.”
― Mark Warren, Two Winters in a Tipi

“In those days a man could pick up, head out West, and start a new life . . . choose any name he wanted. But the man who made his mark in the history books is probably one who stayed true to who he was . . . no matter what he called himself.”
From "Last of the Pistoleers”
― Mark Warren

“There was no solace in the openness of the land, just as there was no healing in the isolation he sought in the barren plain of winter-killed grasses. The prairie seemed nothing more than an extension of the boundless emptiness that had opened inside him. Neither his mount nor his packhorse seemed a companion—but victims of his own aimlessness. The voiceless plain only provided a silent space for his demons to follow and murmur in his ear. Rilla’s bloodied body shadowed him as vividly as if dragged behind his horse on a travois, scraping a scar across the dry land.

The child was not real. There were no memories attached to a nameless son to haunt him, save the mental picture of that inanimate thing tucked against its dead mother’s ribs. The child had seemed more an extension of Rilla’s suffering, giving her death a measurable size and shape. Mother and son comprised a common image rendered in scarlet, and the image had been painted on a permanent altar inside Wyatt’s mind.”
― Mark Warren, The Long Road to Legend

“That fence has gotta 'lectric charge runnin' through it!" Duffy whispered. "Felt like I got struck by lightnin' right b'tween my shoulder blades! It crackled like when the barber turns on his trimmer."

Ott had had his suspicions about the electric fence, but there had been only one way to know for sure. That's why some people were generals and others were sergeants, after all.”
― Mark Warren, Moon of the White Tears

“Don’t trees swallow the fire of the sun? When wood burns, is it not surrendering all those photons of energy that the tree’s leaves once snatched from sunlight and eventually stored within woody fiber?”
― Mark Warren, Two Winters in a Tipi: My Search for the Soul of the Forest

“We put him to the test that afternoon after the Kid woke up. I piled every weapon we had into the wagon and trucked the arsenal halfway across the San Simon Valley. One by one I fired off a round from each of the borrowed weapons and wrote down the order in which I had sent the reports. When I returned at midafternoon, we compared my notes to the Kid’s. Jack had not once failed to identify gun make and model, caliber, and brand of ammunition. He was even able to tell whether I had fired off a report with my right or left hand. Lord knows how he did that.
I, of course, had to see it for myself. We sent Pate off to the South Pass of the Dragoons and he commenced to fire off rounds at dusk. BAM! came the first report, aborning to us from the distant mountains and then quickly disintegrating into the maw of the desert sky.
“Remington forty-four,” Jack said. “Eighteen sixty-nine model.” He sat on a rock with his hands splayed over his stumpy knees and his head cocked for the next selection.
POW!
Jack pursed his lips. “Colt’s Lightning . . . forty-one caliber . . . iv’ry grips.”
BOOM!
At this report Jack chuckled. “Well, first off . . . forty-five caliber Peacemaker, seven-and-a-half-inch barrel,” he announced proudly. Then he smiled. “That ol’ dodger Pate . . . he’s a slick one, tryin’ to pull one on me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Along with the Colt he let go with a derringer, thirty-two caliber. Sounded like it ain’t been cleaned in a while.”
I sat down next to Jack and draped my arm over his rounded shoulders. “Jack, I believe you’ve given credence to the saying that every man on this earth serves a role.”
Jack gave me a look. “ ‘Serves a roll?’ Are we in the restaurant business again?”
― Mark Warren, The Westering Trail Travesties, Five Little Known Tales of the Old West That Probably Ought to A' Stayed That Way

“His seventeen murders aside, Bob was not such a bad guy. I know, because I rode with him and his boys for almost a year. Once, Bob had stayed up half the night to sing an old Apache healing chant to a horse that had bloated with the colic. It worked too. Next morning we found a half-digested tumbleweed in a pile of dung. It measured three feet across. That must have been one hell of a chant.”
― Mark Warren, The Westering Trail Travesties, Five Little Known Tales of the Old West That Probably Ought to A' Stayed That Way

“Though scientists may never verify an answer as to what fundamental, defining trait differentiates man from the creatures of the wild, I will set forth this theory: Could it be that we alone can imagine what it is to be someone or something other than ourselves? And if so, then by practicing that God-given skill, are we not only more human...but also more humane?”
― Mark Warren, Secrets of the Forest, Volume 2: Calling Up the Flame - The Art of Creating Fire, and Feeding the Spirit - Storytelling and Ceremony

“In the dark pre-dawn quiet he lay facing the window by his bed and stared at the stars hanging in the western sky. They floated over the land like the dust of jewels strewn across black water. These stars had become the milestones that marked his coming passage, and he gazed at them this one last time for the sake of preserving a memory, he supposed. One last view through the windowglass of his youth.”
― Mark Warren, The Long Road to Legend

“Ash watched her carefully, scrutinizing her every word and gesture. The question of her sanity came to mind. It was like the scent of something burning in the room.
He swept a hand toward the book. “Are we talking about . . . reincarnation?”
The word took its place in the room like a stranger come in from the cold. Arming himself with cold logic, Ash was ready to challenge any argument she might offer.
“I don’t have all the answers, Ash.” Her voice was gentle and frank, her gray eyes like droplets of water flooded with light. “Hubert said that sometimes there are rare bonds between extraordinary people . . . bonds so strong they cannot be broken . . . not even by death.” She smiled and shrugged a shoulder. “That’s what he said.”
― Mark Warren, A Tale Twice Told

“Every plant you see around you has a God-given purpose...some to cure a disease, others to keep off the skeeters, and plenty to nourish you. If people tell you a plant has no value, it just means they have forgot the old ways."
From "Song of the Horseman”
― Mark Warren

“The more Clayton eyed the terrain of this country, the more he could believe in its prophecy. The clear streams sparkled in sunlight even in the shade of century-old cottonwoods, as if the water were privy to some source of internal light that blinked at will on its surface. The lonely rock outcrops scattered throughout the plain, broke up the grassy expanses like islands dotting the sea of prairie. To the west, the juniper-tufted cliffs rose abruptly, standing like the ramparts of a gigantic fortress that appeared to reach the sky.
Each of these features was like an individual ingredient taken from an ancient recipe that existed before any man had set foot on this land.”
― Mark Warren, Indigo Heaven

“Back at the oak the men lounged in the shade and finished up their meal. Watching Clayt down at the creek, Nestor threw out a quiet question for anyone who would listen.
“How come Clayt don’t wear no spurs?”
“Don’t need ’em,” Lou said. “You seen him ride. He can purty much control a horse with just his knees and neck-reinin’.”
Nestor lay back and propped on both elbows. Lifting a leg, he turned one boot in profile and spun the rowel with the toe of his other boot.
“Hell, I like the way it sounds when I walk.”
Lou stood and brushed off his trousers. “He don’t need that neither.”
― Mark Warren, Indigo Heaven

“Crossing the prairie he had learned something that he knew to be a contradiction: that a constant sound—like the slithering of wind-blown grass—can become its own silence. Here at the edge of the mountain ranges another lesson became clear: this dichotomous land had made some claim upon his soul.

The plains seemed to go on forever, the gently rolling land seeming to mirror the endless sky. The vastness of it all gave him his first seed of hope. Here, in this spacious country where a man was constantly dwarfed by the grandeur of his surroundings, he might learn to burn up his past and let the sparks scatter to the stars. Under this broad Western sky there seemed to be more directions, more possibilities . . . not just about what to do with his life . . . but also what kind of man to be.”
― Mark Warren, Indigo Heaven

“To know a plant well, you must sit with it for as long as it takes to draw its picture. The next time you see that plant in another place, you will encounter an old friend." From "A Copperhead Summer”
― Mark Warren

“If the plants of the forest are a work of the Great Spirit, are they not holy?" From "Requiem to the Silent Stars”
― Mark Warren

“For a time, she alternates sipping her coffee and staring out the window. “Bee-lee would have been the kind of father to spoil a child.” She smiles. “But it would have brought out the best in him.”

“Just like you did,” I am bold to say. “He told me that himself.”

Showing no surprise, she nods. “Yes, I know. He told me many times, and yet I knew it even before he realized it.” She shrugs her head to one side. “I know he had other girls. They all loved him. How could they not? But I knew what we had was the gift that God gives only once.”
― Mark Warren, A Last Serenade for Billy Bonney

“He saddled up the paint and joined the myriad greens of the late summer forest, where a sudden emergence of mushrooms had invaded the valley after last night’s rain. Staying on the low trail he followed the creek along its winding incision through dark stands of hemlocks and white pine, where the sky was all but shut out. Even in deep shadow the creek boiled with white luminescence. The tumbling water seemed to conjure bright light out of nothing. Like patches of snow in moonlight.”
― Mark Warren, Last of the Pistoleers

“I wanted to enter the New Year as clean and shining as a baby beaver’s first incisor. When”
― Mark Warren, Two Winters in a Tipi: My Search for the Soul of the Forest