In a Narrow Grave Quotes

“Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.”
― Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave : Essays on Texas

“Pussyfooting is a vice I have been concerned to avoid.”
― Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave : Essays on Texas

“Lubbock, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls are the three principal cities of the Texas plains cities that I find uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are dry and hot, and winter cold, dusty, and windswept; the population is rigidly conformist on the surface and seethes underneath with Imperfectly suppressed malice.”
― Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave : Essays on Texas

“I can summon no wonder for what lies between Dallas and Washington. The south is memories, memories — it cannot help believing that yesterday was better than tomorrow can possibly be. Some of the memories are extraordinarily well packaged, it is true, but when a place has been reduced in its own estimation no amount of artful packaging can hide the gloom.”
― Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave : Essays on Texas

“I grew up in a bookless town, in a bookless part of the state—when I stepped into a university library, at age eighteen, the whole of”
― Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

“Myself, I dislike frontiers, and yet the sense that my own has vanished produces in me the strongest emotion I have felt in connection with Texas, or with any place. It has embedded itself in the titles of each of my books and just as I think I have worn the emotions out it seizes me again, usually at some unlikely moment. I see my son, age 5, riding a mechanical horse in front of the laundromat on Sunday morning, and the sight calls up my uncle Johnny, when he was age 5, sitting on top of the McMurtry barn watching the last trail her go by. It is indeed a complex distance from those trail drivers who made my father and my uncles determined to be cowboys to the mechanical horse that helps convince my son that he is a cowboy, as he takes a vertical ride in front of a laundromat.”
― Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave : Essays on Texas