Raintree County Quotes

“Hard roads and wide will run through Raintree County. You will hunt it on the map, and it won't be there.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“Did they stop to think, in the midst of their gaiety and laughter, that they were passing burial places and battlegrounds of vanished peoples? Did they think that the winding river was the highway of extinct races, whose skimming light canoes did cleave the same waters in centuries long ago? Did these maidens in wide bonnets, these lads in straw skimmers and bowties, dream of aught but innocent love and beauty and desire as they drifted on languid oars down waters of youth and summertime! Ah! let us behold them this brief while, floating on the classic river of Raintree County, with all their gushing joys in their bloom...”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“Not one-not one single moment of time past can ever be got back. Not one little thing can escape change and death. Lost, the early Republic of our agrarian dream. We fought for it in battle and destroyed the thing we fought for. Lost, the years of our youth. They were good days and many, and they are all gone. And think of all the girls, John, the lovely girls, the lushloined girls who have gone down into the gulf of years.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“It was the code of breezy, cocky men, who had no fear in heaven or earth they would admit to. The code involved never hitting a man who was down, never turning down a drink, never refusing to take a dare, never backing out of a fight-except with a woman. The code involved contempt for city folks, redskins, varmints of all kinds, atheists, scholars, aristocrats, and the enemies of the United States of America.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“We loved—and were fated to sorrow. But from our striving and from our sorrow we fashioned The Oldest Story in the World.”
― Ross Lockridge, Jr., Raintree County

“He had buried all softer emotions in favor of the combat soldier's two main preoccupations-duty and survival. For skillfully and without heroism, he had done his duty. And inflexibly, he had willed to survive. For what? So that one day he could cease to be a fearing, hating, expertly dangerous human being. So that one day he might forcibly lay hands on the hard husk and tear it off and restore to sunlight that young poet of life, a generously emotional, happy, affirmative creature. Johnny Shawnessy of Raintree County. So that one day he might sleep on a soft bed, eat good food, wear civilian clothes, walk freely where he pleased, work at some innocent task that didn't have homicide as its ultimate objective. So that one day-one impossibly remote, breath-taking day-he might put his arms around the supple waist of a young woman who loved him and whom he loved and kiss her upturned face and feel her bare arms on his shoulders.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“One thing was certain. War was the craziest damfool madness that ever was. It was everything vile, absurd, brutal, murderous, confused. Mainly it was just confusion-bloody, stinking, noisy confusion with death as a casual by-product. How anyone ever won a battle, he couldn't imagine. This fight, which had no name and ought never to have a name, had been simply the result of two blind forces launched from vast confusion and colliding in vast confusion. What he had seen today was so incredibly evil and foolish that it baffled classification. No one man or idea was responsible for the evil. It was something in which men got trapped through a lack of foresight. All of them hated it while they were in it, and yet all had agreed to be in it.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“For Raintree County is not the country of the perishable fact. It is the country of the enduring fiction. The clock in the Court House Tower on page five of the "Raintree County Atlas" is always fixed at nine o'clock, and it is summer and the days are long.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“You're clinging to a way of life that is doomed. Go and look at the modern City. How can anyone look at it and believe in love? Or morality? Or the Eternal Ideas? Or the Inalienable Rights? How can anyone believe in the real existence of Raintree County, which you, dear boy and endlessly courageous dreamer, have taken as your image of the enduring values of human life? Yes, go and look at the City, and then look at your little Raintree County, child. Shed a nostalgic tear for it, because the City's going to eat it up. The God of the City is going to kill the ancient God of Raintree County, who has nothing but a couple of stone tablets and a golden rule for weapons.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“If Socrates were living today, the Professor said, he'd be reduced to sitting on a crackerbarrel outside Joe's Saloon chewing tobacco and telling dirty stories. That's what America does to greatness. The Greeks were way ahead of us. They never made the mistake of attaching undue importance to the Individual. And they were right. We Americans make the modern error of dignifying the Individual. We do everything we can to butter him up. We give him a name, we assure him that he has certain inalienable rights, we educate him, we let him pass on his name to his brats, and when he dies, we give him a special hole in the ground and a hunk of stone with his name on it. But after all, he's only a seed, a bloom, and a withering stalk among pressing billions. Your Individual is a pretty disgusting, vain, lewd little bastard-with all his puling palaver about his Rights! By God, he has only one right guaranteed to him in Nature, and that is the right to die and stink to Heaven.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County