Texas Quotes

“After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”
― Ann Richards

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“This is America. We’re entitled to our opinions.”
“Wrong. This is Texas. And my opinion is the only one that counts.”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Call Me Irresistible

“I like Texas and Texans. In Texas, everything is bigger. When Texans win, they win big. And when they lose, it's spectacular.
If you really want to learn the attitude of how to handle risk, losing and failure, go to San Antonio and visit the Alamo. The Alamo is a great story of brave people who chose to fight, knowing there was no hope of success against overwhelming odds. They chose to die instead of surrendering. It's an inspiring story worthy of study; nonetheless, it's still a tragic military defeat. They got their butts kicked. A failure if you will. They lost. So how do Texans handle failure? They still shout, "Remember the Alamo!"
That's why I like Texans so much. They took a great failure and turned it into a tourist destination that makes them millions.
Texans don't bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is formula for all winners.”
― Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money - That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

“I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger's brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "Hell yes, I'm from Texas," deserves whatever happens to him.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell”
― General Philip Henry Sheridan

“You can all go to hell; I will go to Texas”
― David Crockett

“Yeah, you almost got yourself killed, you idiot,” she said smiling. She
was well aware of his daredevil tendencies and to the extent possible,
comfortable with them.
“No, it was something stranger than that. When I was underwater,
my life did flash before my eyes. You know, just like everyone says it
does. But there was . . . something else . . . something that wasn’t part
of my life. It was like it was stuck right there at the end, just before I
popped to the surface, and I can’t imagine what it was.”
Val slowly turned her head back toward the road then asked, “Well,
what was it you saw?”
― Jody Summers, The Mayan Legacy

“Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention."

[Shrub Flubs His Dub, The Nation, June 18, 2001]”
― Molly Ivins

“As a Texan, I say ma'm and sir to my age contemporaries and open doors for anyone that I can. This goes for men, too, though it is appreciated when they beat me to it and disappointing when they don't.”
― Tiffany Madison

“You don't need meat at every meal," Riley offered, forking another bite of salad into his mouth and inwardly agreeing with Jack that it was certainly lacking something. Jack was quiet for all of ten seconds, and then he couldn't hold in his opinion one second more. "Are you really a Texan? I mean, really? Riley, if I have a headache, I'd put bacon around an aspirin before I take it.”
― RJ Scott, The Heart of Texas

“As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.”
― Molly Ivins

“There’s a vastness here and I believe that the people who are born here breathe that vastness into their soul. They dream big dreams and think big thoughts, because there is nothing to hem them in.”
― Conrad Hilton

“There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state—a state that had its own courageous revolution—from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks—as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.”
― Naomi Klein

“These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.

Wait—Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that 'we have billions in surplus'? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.

And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting—the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending—has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.”
― Paul Krugman

“She'd grown up believing in hell in an abstract nightmare way; but west Texas had given her something more concrete upon which to dread the afterlife.”
― Cherie Priest, Dreadful Skin

“I like it here in Austin. Anybody got a room?”
― Keith Richards

“Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it.

[...] He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya'll this and ya'll that, as if they spent the day ropin' and ridin', not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“Libraries offer, for free, the wisdom of the ages--and sages--and, simply put, there's something for everyone inside.”
― Laura Bush

“In the person of Quanah Parker, an extraordinary man in whom the blood of two strong peoples flowed, the Lone Star and the Comanche Moon at last found common ground.”
― Thomas W. Knowles, They Rode for the Lone Star, Volume 1

“It would be nice to think that the menacing aspects of North Korea were for display also, that the bombs and reactors were Potemkin showcases or bargaining chips. On the plane from Beijing I met a group of unsmiling Texan types wearing baseball caps. They were the 'in-country' team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, there to inspect and neutralize North Korea's plutonium rods. Not a nice job, but, as they say, someone has to do it. Speaking of the most controversial reactor at Yongbyon, one of the guys said, 'No sweat. She's shut down now.' Nice to know. But then, so is the rest of North Korean society shut down—animation suspended, all dead quiet on the set, endlessly awaiting not action (we hope) or even cameras, but light.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.

... it was real muggy earlier, hot enough to cook a bear. Anyway, you get used a rapid weather change.”
― Annie Proulx

“I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“It was very hot. All the soil was cracked from the sun. The Texas sun and it had not rained for a very long time.

— Texas Hardpan”
― Stephen Deck, Land of the Story Tellers: 24 Stories and 7 Poems

“My woman is worth the world to me,” Boone replied. He hadn’t moved or lowered the weapon. “My brother, there, means plenty too. The last time you came around, I was flat on my back, near death, but I’m alive and well.”
― Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy, The Legacy of Boone Wilson

“Keep the lights off. They live in the dark anyway.”
― Niedria Dionne Kenny

“Judge Appleton White criticized the New England elite for not helping these new immigrants. He thought we should be educating them. These immigrants, like any new wave of immigrants, I believe, represent the values of hard work and self-reliance that founded this country. From White’s memoir, I made the connection in my lecture to the scapegoating that Latin American immigrants face today. This is an old, cyclical story in which people make it here and then they decide to close the doors behind them. The story is repeated whether you’re English, Irish, Jewish, or Latin American immigrants. But these new immigrants, whoever they are, should remind those already here, what it took to make it in America, what desire burned in these immigrants to never give up, and what kind of hope these newcomers had, despite the dangers. These are the best American values.

I wanted to write about the new pilgrims of this country — nobody’s children. These people—like Turi, Molly, and Arnulfo—who represent the best values of this country. The values of trying to make it on your own. The values of fighting for your place. The values of helping each other. These are the basic values that started this country and served as its foundation. But too often we have forgotten them, and where these values came from.

And this working to become American, to find your place, instead of assuming your privileged place, this is Aristotle through and through. For Aristotle, you need to work and to act to find meaning in the idea of the good. An American who is growing fat and happy in Dallas, or anywhere else, will not have that practical, in-the-trenches Aristotelian understanding of what it takes to belong after a long struggle, like a new immigrant.”
― Sergio Troncoso, Nobody's Pilgrims