Quotes & Sayings About West Texas

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself. — Truman Capote

In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse. — Marc Reisner

All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair. — Lyndon B. Johnson

I like my buddies from west Texas. I liked them when I was young, I liked them then I was middle-age, I liked them before I was president, and I like them during president, and I like them after president. — George W. Bush

After some pondering, I made a decision that would affect all of my future work and writing in more ways than I could ever have anticipated. It was a decision between seminary and college teaching. More so it was a decision between two very different cultures of New England and the Southwest. I chose seminary teaching in Texas, which was a decision some of my colleague on the East Coast thought was foolish. From then on, as long as I was in the Southwest, I would feel the sting of the silent condescension and stereo typing by Eastern elites who disdained southwestern American culture. Many viewed as inconsequential everything that happened west of the Hudson River. What they disparaged was exactly what I loved, the easy going, unpretentious, common culture of my native landscape in Oklahoma and Texas. — Thomas C. Oden

The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world - - the cowboy songs of Texas and the West - - are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses. — J. Frank Dobie

Son, not everbody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven. — Cormac McCarthy

There are so few other things we can look at with pride,' said Allen. 'We don't have a large university that has thirty or forty thousand students in it. We don't have the art museum that some communities have and are world-renowned. When somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football. There is nothing to replace it. It's an integral part of what made the community strong. You take it away and it's almost like you strip the identity of the people. — H. G. Bissinger

When he stood trembling with fear before the captor, bruised from falls by the restrictive rope, made submissive by choking, clogs, cuts and starvation, he had lost what made him so beautiful and free ... One out of every three mustangs captured in south west Texas was expected to die before they were tamed. The process often broke the spirits of the other two. — J. Frank Dobie

Our room swallowed light whole. Even in summer when sunlight glared through the windows, it was somehow dim inside. Now it was only Easter morning, and the muted sky of early spring offered scant relief to our tenebrous room. On our side of the house a gnarled and ancient oak tree spread its reach across the back facade of the house as if to shade and protect us. One of the massive branches of its principal fork reached invitingly right up to our window to offer to take us wherever we wanted to go. This great limb, with circumference grander than both of us together, was our stairway to heaven and our secret exit to the ground; it was our biplane in the Great War of our imaginations and a magic carpet to Araby; it was our lookout post and the clubhouse of our most secret fraternal order; it was our secret passageway through the imaginary castle we made of our house. It was our escape from the darkness into the light. — Mason West

...so I looked at this kid from West Texas, feelin' all cut up an' betrayed 'cause he suddenly realized the Land of the Free been fuckin' him in the ass all his life--an' I told myself, 'Shit, so that's what it's like to be the white boy. Any nigga you ask can tell you that's how America works. — Garth Ennis

If you had planned to come to Crawford in the middle of the hot summer in August, no one would have come with you, if you had planned it. But spontaneously, we have now been here 11 days in the most intense heat that you can imagine of west Texas. Some of the most intense heat thunderstorms. — Ann Wright

If I owned hell and west Texas, he said, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell. — Jeannette Walls

On a whim, Pisit calls the monk back to ask what he thinks of all this, and Western culture in general. After his drubbing just now he is in a Zen-ish sort of mood, not to say downright sarcastic: 'Actually, the West is Culture of Emergency: Twisters in Texas, earthquakes in California, windchill in Chicago, drought, flood, famine, epidemics, war on everything - watch out for that meteor and how much longer does the sun really have? Of course, if you didn't believe you could control everything, there wouldn't be an emergency, would there? — John Burdett

Charged with the mission of operating beyond the boundaries of civilization with minimal support and no communication from higher authority, they lived and often died by the motto, 'Order first, then law will follow. — Thomas W. Knowles

As a child of West Texas, I identify with Hispanic culture every bit as much as I do North American culture. — Tommy Lee Jones

Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl ... — Marty Robbins

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

A man from Iowa or Illinois will say 'I'm from the Middle West'..a Georgian or a Mississipian may admit to being merely a Southerner ... but no Texan, given the opportunity, ever said otherwise than 'I'm from Texas'. — J. Frank Dobie

When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries. — Jenny Lawson

I attended public school in Houston. I took piano lessons for several years, and in high school, I played trombone in the marching band. I remember especially enjoying two seasonal activities: ice skating with the Houston Figure Skating Club in the winter and visiting an aunt and uncle's farm in West Texas in the summer. — Robert Woodrow Wilson

I went to West Texas and started writing a cycle of Americana poems after the space conjured images that, as a child, I only saw on television-John Wayne, cowboys, borderlines. But suddenly, I felt close to these once-foreign imageries and wondered how I'd changed. Each evening brought the darkest skies in the country, and I understood the expansiveness of our inner selves. Ultimately nothing divides us except the worlds and words we allow. — Nathalie Handal

Give me an Army of West Point graduates and I'll win a battle ... Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I'll win a war. — George S. Patton Jr.

Houston is a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West
which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch. — Hunter S. Thompson

I feel very at home in L.A., I think, because it's dry, and there's sun, like the West Texas I grew up in. — Stephen Graham Jones

He met Austin's gaze over the top of Faith's head. "I sure hope your baby is a boy."
"Reckon we need to even things out a little, don't we?"
Rawley gave him a brusque nod. "We men folk are sorely outnumbered."
Austin laughed, remembering a time when that was exactly what Dallas had wanted: more women out in West Texas.
-Austin and Rawley — Lorraine Heath

Most of 'All Hail West Texas' was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins of all the Xeroxed material. — John Darnielle

Katz traces the courageous role of Black women in settling the West (and] deftly shows how these pioneering spirits helped stabilize early communities in Texas, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere. — Herb Boyd

During the cold war, West Berlin was an exclave - a tiny outpost of liberalism surrounded by people who want to crush it. It was like Austin, Texas. — Craig Ferguson

During my 40-year coaching career at West Point, Indiana and Texas Tech, my teams reached the Final Four on five occasions, winning the national championship three times. — Bobby Knight

I get around OK with a toolbox. As a kid, I picked up skills following my dad through the oil fields of Oklahoma and West Texas. My wife Janine is hard to impress, but she does think it's cool when I fix things around the house. — Ronnie Dunn

He rode out in the dark long before daylight and he rode the sun up and he rode it down again. In the oncoming years a terrible drought struck west Texas. He moved on. There was no work in that country anywhere. Pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old. — Cormac McCarthy

If people want to get to know me better, they've got to know my parents and the values my parents instilled in me, and the fact that I was raised in West Texas, in the middle of the desert, a long way away from anywhere, hardly. There's a certain set of values you learn in that experience. — George W. Bush

Coming from West Texas at the time that I did, I didn't know you could be an actor. It didn't seem like something that actually happened. — Deanna Dunagan

I was raised in the West. The west of Texas. It's pretty close to California. In more ways than Washington, D.C., is close to California. — George W. Bush