"True Grit"

[fiefoe]

Donna Tartt wrote a very appreciative afterword for Charles Portis's hardcore western. To quote: 'a great part of True Grit’s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America', 'she is less Huck Finn’s little sister than Captain Ahab’s.'

• He had mistaken the drummers for men. “The wicked flee when none pursueth.” {Which is followed by ": but the righteous are bold as a lion."}
• I know many fine people live in Fort Smith and they have one of the nation’s most modern waterworks but it does not look like it belongs in Arkansas to me. {Among Mattie's multiple charms, her pride to be an Arkansasan is certainly one.}
• I have since learned that Judge Isaac Parker watched all his hangings from an upper window in the Courthouse. I suppose he did this from a sense of duty. There is no knowing what is in a man’s heart.
• He showed me a list of indicted outlaws that were then on the loose in the Indian Territory and it looked like the delinquent tax list that they run in the Arkansas Gazette every year in little type.
• You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.
• I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts... I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces?
• The civilizing arts of commerce
• If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.
• Big Faye dresses out at about two hundred and ninety pounds. The bullets could not make it through to any vitals. That was unusual. It will give you good service against ordinary people.
• “What is your name?” said he. “Pudding and tame,” said I.
• “I would gladly take pen in hand and write a thick book on my misadventures here, but dare not for fear of being called a lying romancer.”
• All I have heard out of you so far is talk. I know you can drink whiskey and I have seen you kill a gray rat. All the rest has been talk. They told me you had grit and that is why I came to you. I am not paying for talk.
• I picked up a handful of expense sheets from the table and jerked up a stove lid with a lifter. I held them over the flames. “You had best stand back if these papers have any value to you,” said I.
• “I will pay the market price. I believe you said the soap man offered ten dollars a head.” “That is a lot price. You will recall that I paid you twenty dollars a head only this morning.” “That was the market price at that time.”
• You are being stiff-necked about this. You are young. It is time you learned that you cannot have your way in every little particular. Other people have got their interests too.”
• Get crossways of me, LaBoeuf, and you will think a thousand of brick has fell on you. You will wisht you had been at the Alamo with Travis.”
• Little Blackie had a hard gait, a painful trot, and I made him speed up and slow down until he had achieved a pace, a kind of lope, that was not so jarring.
• rather civilized Creeks and Cherokees and Choctaws from Mississippi and Alabama who had owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy and wore store clothes.
• That is all right but they are not sound on Election. They do not fully accept it. I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it. Read I Corinthians 6: 13 and II Timothy 1: 9, 10. Also I Peter 1: 2, 19, 20 and Romans 11: 7. There you have it. It was good for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. {What}
• Rooster said, “If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar.”
• McAlester is also the international headquarters of the Order of the Rainbow for Girls.
• “I am happy he done it,” said Lucky Ned Pepper. “I don’t say he wan’t game, I say he was green. All kids is game, but a man will keep his head and look out for his own self.
• banknotes with a stick? But the unlettered bandit chieftain knew little of the world of banking except for such glimpses as he got over a gun sight, and he was pleased with the work. I signed and signed, using his palm for an inkwell.
• One more pull and I would have the body close enough so that I could work the shirt free. As I made ready for the job my eyes were attracted to something—movement? —within the cavity formed by the curving gray ribs. I leaned over for a closer look. Snakes! A ball of snakes! I flung myself back but of course there was no real retreat for me, imprisoned as I was in the mossy trap.
• No! Checked short! I was shakily suspended in space by the bone under my armpit. Bats flew up past my face and the ones below were carrying on like a tree full of sparrows at sundown.
• They were old men. I supposed Rooster must have aged a good deal too. These old-timers had all fought together in the border strife under Quantrill’s black standard, and afterward led dangerous lives, and now this was all they were fit for, to show themselves to the public like strange wild beasts of the jungle.
• This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.