## Metadata - Author: [[Larry McMurtry]] - Full Title: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen - Category: #books ## Highlights - Unfit for ranch work because of my indifference to cattle—if sent to fetch a particular animal I usually came back with the wrong one—I went instead into the antiquarian book trade, becoming, in effect, a book rancher, herding books into larger and larger ranches (I now have filled a whole town with them, my equivalent of the King Ranch). I couldn’t find the right cow, but I could find the right books, extricating them from the once dense thickets of America’s antiquarian bookshops. But the metaphor of herding can be pushed even further, to writing itself: what is it but a way of herding words? First I try to herd a few desirable words into a sentence, and then I corral them into small pastures called paragraphs, before spreading them across the spacious ranges of a novel. ([Location 612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NE6HIY&location=612)) - The hunger for information is, after all, normal, but the need for continuity may be even stronger. ([Location 1265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NE6HIY&location=1265)) - Once one has understood to some slight degree what settling America meant in terms of work, privation, effort, and gained some sense of what the pioneers did with their energies and their spirit, it is easy to understand why they didn’t do art—art had to wait until the country had been subdued and made responsive enough that it could supply the basic human needs. ([Location 1586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NE6HIY&location=1586)) - This essay is partly about memory. Why does one remember one thing vividly and another thing vaguely, if at all? In the course of this piece I’ve come to realize that the only things I remember as well as I remember certain books, found in certain bookshops, in such and such condition, are women, about whom I mean to say little or nothing just at the present time. ([Location 1971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003NE6HIY&location=1971))