Quotessence
Home / Topics / Westerns Quotes

Westerns Quotes

Browse 19 quotes about Westerns.

Westerns Quotes

“Zlata Dromenko was a stout Cossack about my height with a thick single eyebrow giving her a serious, severe look. I found out she’d been a mail-order bride who came over from Ukraine to marry a local farmer, a Russian immigrant. He died, though, and now Mrs. Dromenko worked in the hospital bullying patients like me. I called her “Hun,” because she made me think of Attila. I was curious as to how Mr. Dromenko died but was afraid to ask.”

ActionLiteratureMysteryAdventureDramaExcitingYaSci FiNative AmericanWesterns
Book:Dire Wolf of the Quapaw: a Jubal Smoak Mystery
Create image

“I’m Caitlin McDonald,” she said, loosening the thick wool scarf from around her neck and down off her face, motioning her chin toward the big male. “You’ve already met Hector and his gang.” When Major Standback said widow I pictured an older woman. Not this one. She was young, no more than thirty. The cold on the skin of her fine features made her face shine. She had the clean, clear beauty of a china doll.”

FictionMysteryYoung AdultYaNative AmericanTeenFiction BooksWesternsNative American Fiction
Book:Dire Wolf of the Quapaw: a Jubal Smoak Mystery
Create image

“Makade-ma'iingan walked slowly toward him out of the gloom. She circled him, her head low, her cerulean eyes lancing into him like arrows. Her voice spoke in his grandmother’s tongue. “Myeengun, you must rise and finish your work, rip out the throats of the whites who oppress and pursue us. The spirit of your grandmother, the spirits of all your people, demand it. I am Otshee monetoo, and I command it.” She lunged, sinking her yellow teeth deep into his chest where he’d pressed the knife. The flash of pain struck him like a sudden bolt from angry clouds. It reached so much beyond his level to endure, that this time he did cry out. His feral howl screaming out into the cold night, rolling through the valley like a keening from the damned.”

ActionLiteratureMysteryDramaExcitingYaSci FiNative AmericanWesterns
Book:Dire Wolf of the Quapaw: a Jubal Smoak Mystery
Create image

“Corrigan crept up to the bar, cautiously moving around it. It looked like he was copying all the moves he’d seen in old cop movies and westerns, and doing it rather badly. He lowered the pistol. There was no one behind the bar. There was however, an open trapdoor. And that would mean the bounty hunter was - . “Don’t move!” Came Beck’s distant, slightly muffled, barked order. “My turn, I think!”

OrderThinkOneMoveAroundHunterBarTurnWouldPistolDistantWesternsHoweverLookedBadlyMuffledCorriganLoweredTrapdoor
Book:Black Sunrise
Create image

“History is often told through grand events and famous names. I wanted to tell a story about the people who rarely make the headlines—the ones who got up every day, did the work in front of them, and quietly moved the world forward one field, one family, one small-town decision at a time.”

Historical FictionFamily HistoryWesterns19th Century America
Book:The Ordinary Grit: Courage Under an Unforgiving Sky
Create image

“...perhaps the Great American Desert's importance to the Western genre derives from the nineteenth-century view of the arid West as the natural refuge of Indians and, by extension, of all outlaws. The agrarian ideal, with its roots in Rousseau's thought, defined civilisation as arising from the agricultural life, so the migratory Indians - often compared in nineteent-century writings to Tartars and Bedouin - were, by reason of their socioeconomic organisation, outside the pale of civilised society and the area in which they moved was regarded as fit only for outlaws. It is as a milieu within which men outside civilised, agrarian society resolve their tensions, both personal and social, that the Western has used the myth of the Great American Desert, as in Riders of Death Valley (Forde Beebe and Ray Taylor, 1941), The Last Wagon (Delmer Daves, 1956), The Law and Jake Wade (John Sturges, 1958) and the Boetticher cycle.”

Civilized SocietyNative AmericansAmerican WestOutlawsRousseauWesternsThe Desert
Book:Cinema, A Quarterly Magazine, No. 4, October 1969
Create image

“It seems fitting, however, that the single Western film which most unambiguously endorses the agrarian ideal, The Covered Wagon, should contain one of the cinema screen's most graphic attacks on Industrialism. The film's intertitles inform viewers that one of the most formidable hazards facing the character of Wingate (Charles Stanton Ogle), the leader of the wagon train, is greed arising from the California gold strike of 1849. Several pioneers opt to dig gold in California rather than plow land in Oregon. In a visual composition symbollically resonant with the importance and irrevocability of that choice, the wagon train divides, one part going north and the other south, while visible in the foreground lie the discarded plows of those who have foresaken the agrarian ideal. These shots from a silent Western summarise a major split in the American psyche.”

CaliforniaOregonWesternsAgrarianismPlowAmerican PsycheCovered Wagon1849California Gold RushWagon Train
Book:Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays
Create image

“Added to the exigencies of structure are the necessities developing about the recurring characters in any [television] series. These types must remain stable enough for audience identification and development of residual personality, yet they are also responsible for satisfying the constant demand for variety. Irwin Blacker indicates the problem of developing character as one of the difficulties of creating a classic Western in the television format. If the story is to have any significance, says Blacker, the people in it must change; yet in a Western series the hero cannot risk change. The writer, therefore, must continually use "guest" characters who are able to develop, change, or die within the context of the weekly episode while the hero functions as a catalyst in that action. This constraint, though preventing the series from developing into a significant drama, achieves a twofold purpose necessary to the continuing story: the variety of secondary plots and character retains audience interest; the stability of the continually developing (but basically unchanging) residual personality of the hero sustains audience loyalty.”

TelevisionCharacter DevelopmentTropesWesterns1982
Book:The Western Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mythology
Create image