quotations about Texas
The rest of the world is sweeping past us. The oil and gas of the Texas future is the well-educated mind. But we are still worried about whether Midland can beat Odessa at football.
MARK WHITE
advocating a "no pass, no play" policy in Texas public schools, 1985
Doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?
MARTIN AMIS
"The Palace of the End", The Guardian, March 4, 2003
Texans ignore "better," long ago forgot the useless word "good." Everything in Texas is "best."
EDWARD SMITH
Account of a Journey Through North-Eastern Texas
The St. Louis Mirror, the brightest weekly in the world, recently had a remarkably interesting article on Texas politics; but somehow it suggested to my mind that German metaphysician who, having never seen a lion or read a description of one, undertook to evolve a correct idea of the king of beasts from his own inner consciousness.
WILLIAM COWPER BRANN
The Iconoclast
The hard-right domination of Texas politics frustrates the state's Democrats and plenty of others in Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. They are agitated, but they stay put because they view Texas as forever, and Republican Texas as a kind of temporary occupation.
MANNY FERNANDEZ
"What Makes Texas Texas", New York Times, May 7, 2017
Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.
JOHN STEINBECK
Travels With Charley: In Search of America
Well, Texas is like that, when I was a kid. You can just do whatever you want out here: shoot machine guns, ride dirt bikes, the roads aren't crowded, you can get great property, there's no state income tax. But I don't want anybody else to move here.
JESSE JAMES
"Jesse James Reveals .45-Caliber Pistol He Made For President Trump", Maxim, January 18, 2018
When Alaska achieved statehood Texas did not for a moment surrender its historic place in the grammar of American language and braggadocio: big, bigger, biggest, Texan. Texans argue that while Alaska is twice as large in terms of crude bulk it is Texas that remains, in more significant ways, powerful, grand and pre-eminent, the basic American metaphor for size, grossness, power, wealth, ambition, high-rolling, and boasting: in a word, Texanic.
TREVOR FISHLOCK
The State of America
Years ago someone pointed out that Texas is hell on women and horses. He was wrong about horses, for most horses are considered to be valuable, and are treated very well.
LARRY MCMURTRY
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it.... He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya'll this and ya'll that, as if they spent the day ropin' and ridin', not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.
JUSTIN CRONIN
The Passage
I'd rather be a fencepost in Texas, than the king of Tennessee.
ANONYMOUS
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
Dreadful Skin
The Great State of Texas is like a John Holmes movie. One cannot help but be impressed at the size of the thing. The East is lush and green; the West flat and dusty, and the Northern border sports a wall. At the center of it all lies Houston, a cultural Eden. A Northerner was once asked, "What do you think about civilization in Texas?" and he replied, "I'm all for it." Naturally they shot him.
JAMES HOLD
Out of Texas
All my ex's live in Texas,
And Texas is a place I'd dearly love to be.
But all my ex's live in Texas
And that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee.
GEORGE STRAIT
"All My Ex's live in Texas"
Today Texas is like a patchwork quilt. Cowboys still exist, although now they use jeeps or helicopters to round up animals. Oil is still important, although new gushers like Spindletop don't happen often anymore. Texas is still a frontier state, but today the pioneers are conquering space, the final frontier, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space center in Houston.
RACHEL BARENBLAT
Texas, the Lone Star State
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
attributed, Sam Houston Memorial Museum
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
after sniper Charles Whitman killed fourteen people on the campus of UT Austin, Boston Globe, 1966
"Truth" in Texas is topic sensative. If you're doing a business deal, a true Texan always stands by his word. There is nothing more sacred to Texans than their word, and they will do anything in their power to meet their obligations. But when it comes to tellin' stories, the whole truth thing blurs quite a bit.
JIM GRAMON
attributed, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said About Texas
I think part of the reason Texas is having a moment is because it's being more itself than it's ever been. It's Texas unchained, in a way.
STEPHEN HARRIGAN
"What Makes Texas Texas", New York Times, May 7, 2017
The coyotes wail along the trail
Deep in the heart of Texas
The rabbits rush around the brush
Deep in the heart of Texas
The cowboys cry, "Ki yippee yi!"
Deep in the heart of Texas
The dogies bawl and bawl and bawl
Deep in the heart of Texas
JUNE HERSHEY
"Deep in the Heart of Texas"