Charles Portis Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?

Charles Portis
If you want anything done right you will have to see to it yourself every time.

Charles Portis
Listen, here's what I'd like to do: I'd like to live in a trailer and play records all night.

Charles Portis
I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience! Which will you have?
I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!
Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!

Charles Portis
She gave me a pledge card, a card promising an annual gift of $5, $10, or $25 toward the support of the Unity mission. I filled it out under the hot light of the projector. The name and address spaces were much too short, unless you wrote a very fine hand or unless your name was Ed Poe and you lived at 1 Elm St.

Charles Portis
I have never been one to flinch or crawfish when faced with an unpleasant task.

Charles Portis
One time you smash a bug with no mercy. Another time you find one helpless on his back with his legs flailing the air, and you flip him over and let him go on his way. The struggle that touches the heart.

Charles Portis
As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.

Charles Portis
I have left off crying, and giggling as well. Now make up your mind. I don't care anything for all this talk. You told me what your price for the job was and I have come up with it. Here is the money. I aim to get Tom Chaney and if you are not game I will find somebody who is game. All I have heard out of you so far is talk. I know you can drink whiskey and I have seen you kill a gray rat. All the rest has been talk. They told me you had grit and that is why I came to you. I am not paying for talk. I can get all the talk I need and more at the Monarch boardinghouse.

Charles Portis
You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.

Charles Portis
Tom Chaney rode his gray horse that was better suited to pulling a middlebuster than carrying a rider. He had no hand gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you. He could have taken an old piece of harness and made a nice leather strap for it. That would have been too much trouble.

Charles Portis
I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces?

Charles Portis
People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

Charles Portis
You do not think much of me, do you, Cogburn?
I don't think about you at all when your mouth is closed.

Charles Portis
Had they determined him to be half crazy all the time or full crazy half the time?... He had whatever the opposite of paranoia is called. He thought everybody liked him and took a deep personal interest in his welfare. But then everybody did like him.

Charles Portis
I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.

Charles Portis
I never seen anybody from Texas I couldn't shade. Get cross-ways of me, LaBoeuf, and you will think a thousand of brick has fell on you. You will wisht you had been at the Alamo with Travis.

Charles Portis
Nothing is too long or too short either if you have a true and interesting tale and what I call a "graphic" writing style combined with educational aims.

Charles Portis
On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife's religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need for some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.

Charles Portis
I know what they said even if they would not say it to my face. People love to talk. They love to slander you if you have any substance. They say I love nothing but money and the Presbyterian Church and that is why I never married.

Charles Portis
I have since learned that Judge Isaac Parker watched all his hangings from an upper window in the Courthouse. I suppose he did this from a sense of duty. There is no knowing what is in a man's heart.

Charles Portis
My Master of Arts degree means nothing at all to these monkeys and I have come to share their indifference.

Charles Portis
Most girls like play pretties, but you like guns, don't you?
I don't care a thing in the world about guns. If I did I would have one that worked.

Charles Portis
If in four months I could not find Tom Chaney with a mark on his face like banished Cain I would not undertake to advise others how to do it.

Charles Portis