Larry McMurtry Quotes

Once again there was the desert, and that only.

… the same dreary barrenness day after day. The same naked waste. I have never seen anything which impressed so strongly on my mind a feeling of desolation.

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.

I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.

Nowhere, not at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains.

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.

A desert is a place without expectation.

The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.

My personal life is fairly barren.

The desert feels Irish in a way - lonely and barren.

To be inside an abandoned mall is surreal. Often times I feel like I'm the last person alive on the planet.

If you ever find yourself on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you look around in every direction and don't see anything. That's a terrifying experience.

Wyoming - God bless you in Wyoming - it's very boring, and it's the most isolated place on Earth.

The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don't always return.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.

It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone.