Welcome to Hard Times Quotes

“one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn't let you settle.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times

“There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It’s as if their living didn’t matter at all.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“Why does there have to be promise before destruction?”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“I keep thinking someone will come by sometime who will want to use the wood.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“A person cannot live without looking for good signs, you just cannot do it, and I thought these signs were good.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“Really how life gets on is a secret, you only know your memory, and it makes its own time. The real time leads you along and you never know when it happens, the best that can be is come and gone.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“if a good sign is so important you can just as soon make one up and fool yourself that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“And each morning the sun came up weaker and whiter, like an old man rising from his bed, and each morning’s chill was slower giving up the ground.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“Only a fool would call anywhere in this land a place and everywhere else a journey to it.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“can pay off on our failures, and Molly’s grin had burned the hope right out of me.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“The only hope we have is that we”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“Now the saying is common that Sam Colt made men equal. But if it is true then our town wouldn’t have burned up in the rain; instead that Bad Man would have been buried with due honors and a proper notice sent to the Territory Office. He would have had a hole in his chest, or his back, and the one who shot him would have Avery standing him a drink and maybe redheaded Flo and Molly smiling his way. Colt gave every man a gun, but you have to squeeze the trigger for yourself. A few times during that long cold night I thought the Bad Man was coming back.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“Truth is, if the drought don’t get you and the blizzards don’t get you, that’s when some devil with liquor in his soul and a gun in his claw will ride you down and clean you out.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It’s as if their living didn’t matter at all. I”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“If I’d had you before me at Richmond, I’d have put the ball in yer eye, God help you, I killed twenty like you when I was younger,” his voice piped over the flats. “Let the sun drop you in the badlands and let you not die before the shit of prairie dogs is in yer mouth and the buzzard’s claw is on yer belly. May yer pizzle fry in Hell and your eggs wither to peas, may the marrow boil in yer bones and yer eyes melt in their holes for what you done here, God damn you, God damn you …”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“Your father’s doing is in you, like his father’s was in him, and we can never start new, we take on all the burden: the only thing that grows is trouble, the disasters get bigger, that’s all. I”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel

“The only hope we have is that we can pay off on our failures”
― E.L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times: A Novel