In the hills we like our coffee strong but this here would make bobwire grow ona man's chest in the place of hair.

There would be trouble enough, but a man is born to trouble, and it is best to meet it when it comes and not lose sleep until it does.

He fancied himself as a tough man and a gunfighter, but he didn't really want anybody shooting at him.  The trouble with having a reputation as a tough man is that the time always comes when you have to be a tough man.

Suddenly something had happened to me, and it happened to Orrin too.  The world had burst wide open, and where our narrow valleys had been, our hog-backed ridges, our huddled towns and villages, there was now a world without end or limit.  Where our world had been one of a few mountain valleys, it was now as wide as the earth itself, and wider, for where the land ended there was sky, and no end at all to that.

Sometimes I wonder if anything is ever ended.  The words a man speaks today live on in his thoughts or the memories of others, and the shot fired, the blow struck, the thing done today is like a stone tossed into a pool and the ripples keep widening out until they touch lives far from ours.

Violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.

If crooked gambling, thieving, and robbing are covered over, folks will tolerate it longer than outright violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.