The Lonesome Gods | 
pickStole a few minutes to finish my first Louis L‘Amour!
“My father prepared me for marvels.”
“You are history,” Thomas Fraser told us. “Do not think of history as something remote the concerns on the Kings, Queens, and generals. It concerns you... you and your families march across the pages of history, and often he who plows a furrow is of more importance than he who leads an army. The army can destroy, the furrow can feed.”
“Actual...all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child‘s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.”
Pt3: “My friend,” he said, “ I do not know what else I shall leave my son, but if I have left him a love of language, literature, a taste for Homer, for the poets, the people who have told our story—and by ‘our‘ I mean the story of mankind—he will have legacy enough.“
Pt2: “Who knows how much he will remember? Who knows how deep the intellect? In some year yet unborn he may hear those words again, read them, and find in them something hauntingly familiar, as of something long ago heard and only half-remembered.”
“You are reading [The Iliad]?” he asked. “I have read it many times. Now I read it to my son.” “But he is too young!” The man protested, almost angry. “Is he? Who is to say? How young is too young to begin to discover the power and the beauty of words? Perhaps he will not understand, but there is a clash of shields and a call of trumpets in those lines. One cannot begin too young nor linger too long with learning.”
“There was a cowhand once who said that Shakespeare was the only poet who wrote like he‘d been raised on red meat.”
“You must have an education! It is time you were in school, but here there is no school! ... But read. There are books here, read them, all of them. Find others. Many a man had done well with no more of an education than what he can have by reading.”
“You are a hero!” Miss Nesselrode said positively.
Papa smiled at her. “It is an empty word out here, ma‘am. It is a word for writers and sitters by the fire. Out her a man does what the situation demands. Out on the frontier we do not have heroes, only people doing what is necessary at the time.” p. 24
pickLoves this book, can't believe it took me so long to get into Louis L'Amour.
