If there is one thing I have come across a lot of while working on Texas Confidential it is great quotes about the Lone Star State! I wanted to begin sharing some of these and decided to start this section as a means of doing so. Naturally, many of these will be related to Sex, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem (and have indicated when these have a tie-in with one of my chapters), which is what I have been reading about over the past year, but I hope to expand beyond those themes. Moving forward I will probably post a couple a week, starting with some I think are especially fun or evocative, and you should feel free to share your own favorite quotes by making a "Comment" to this post!
"At first, I wanted to be an opera singer but my voice wasn’t good enough. My second choice was ballerina. After that, it was a series of compromises."
— Georgina Spelvin ("Porno, Texas Style," Sex Section)
"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 is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else."
— Pete Hamill
"You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans."
— George Carlin
"All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men."
— Sam Houston {"Rogues of the Alamo," Scandal Section, "The Texas Indian Wars," Mayhem Section)
"Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word."
— Author John Steinbeck
"Houston is, without a doubt, the weirdest, most entertaining city in Texas, consisting as it does of subtropical forest, life in the fast lane, a layer of oil, cowboys and spacemen"
— Insight Guide Texas
"I feel safer on a racetrack than I do on Houston's freeways."
— A.J. Foyt
“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”
— Gen. Phil Sheridan, 1866
"El Paso and its sister city across the Rio Grande — Juarez, Mexico — form the world's largest border town, a valley of sinister warrens and glittering high-rises between two mountain ranges divided by a puny culvert called the Rio Grande."
— Gary Cartwright, Dirty Dealing
"You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas."
— David Crockett {"Rogues of the Alamo," Scandal Section)
"Calling a taxi in Texas is like calling a rabbi in Iraq."
— Fran Lebowitz
Robert, those are both good ones! I had heard the one from Crockett but not the one from Lebowitz. So where was she trying to get a cab in Texas? I am pretty sure there isn't one within 50 miles of where I live!
ReplyDeleteHow is it, by the way, that half of our quotes about Texas to this point have the word "Hell" in them? I wonder how much of a trend that is going to end up being ... I have, in any event, been thinking about starting a post of Texas place names that have "Hell," "Devil," and like words in them!