Oakley Hall Quotes & Sayings

For wine is the color of blood and the texture of tears, and you can drink it to warm your belly and piss it out to get rid of it. And forget the whole damned mess that is too much for any man to face. — Oakley Hall

The only means by which field-grade officers can expect a promotion is combat. — Oakley Hall

If you read novels you sympathize with people who are different kinds of people than you are. — Oakley Hall

I should think it might be difficult to possess a wife whom almost every other man in town has known so intimately, but no doubt True Love Conquers All. — Oakley Hall

Any man who has got himself set over others and don't have any responsibility to something bigger than him is a son of a bitch. — Oakley Hall

We are a race of tradition-lovers in a new land, of king-reverers in a Republic, of hero-worshipers in a society of mundane get-and-spend. It is a Country and a Time where any bank clerk or common laborer can become a famous outlaw, where an outlaw can in a very short time be sainted in song and story into a Robin Hood, where a Frontier Model Excalibur can be drawn from the block at any gunshop for twenty dollars. — Oakley Hall

Cussing your daddy when he is crippled so he can't beat your teeth down your throat for it. Well, it is sire and dam in a man like a horse, and no way to get yourself a boy without there is half woman in him. — Oakley Hall

Yes, you learn your lessons as they come your way ... And when you have learned them all they can stick red-hot pokers in your wife and babies and you will only laugh to see it. Because you will know by then that people don't matter a damn. Men are like corn growing. The sun burns them up and the rain washes them out and the winter freezes them, and the cavalry tramps them down, but somehow they keep growing. And none of it matters a damn so long as the whisky holds out. — Oakley Hall

Ah,the pure shine of a few moments of heroism, high courage, and derring-do! In its light we genuflect before the Hero, we bask inthe warmth of his Deeds, we tout him, shout him praises, deify him, and, in short, make of him what no mortal could ever be. — Oakley Hall

Is not the semblance of guilt, however slight the tinge, already a corruption? — Oakley Hall

As one half of our nature seeks to create heroes to worship, the other must ceaselessly attempt to cast them down and discover evidence of feet-of-clay, in order to label them as mere lucky fellows, or as villains-were-the-facts-but-known, and the eminent and great are ground between the millstones of envy, and reduced again to common size. — Oakley Hall

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction. — Oakley Hall