Robert Ruark

North Carolina · born or raised1915–1965

American writer (1915-1965)

Born in Wilmington
Studied at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Studied at New Hanover High School

novelist, writer, journalist, film director

Quotations with a citation

Dinnertime, and the living is greasy.

This is a book about Africa in which I have tried to avoid most of the foolishness, personal heroism, and general exaggeration which usually attend works of this sort. It is a book important only to the writer and has no sociological significance whatsoever.

A man and a gun and a star and a beast are still ponderable in a world of imponderables. The essence of the simple ponderable is man’s potential ability to slay a lion. It is an opportunity that comes to few, but the urge is always present. Never forget that man is not a dehydrated nellie under his silly striped pants. He is a direct descendant of the hairy fellow who tore his meat raw from the pulsing flanks of just-slain beasts and who wiped his greasy fingers on his thighs if he bothered to wipe then at all. I wiped my greasy fingers on my thigh, for practice. This is the only deeply rooted reason I can produce for the almost universal.

"Toa bundouki m'kubwa," I said. "The big one. Gimme the .470." The gunbearer snapped the barrels onto the elephant gun and slipped a couple of cigar-sized shells into it. I held it on the gory hyena and took his head off. "They say it’s a good woodchuck gun, the .220," Harry said. "I’m inclined to believe they may be right. But for pigs and hyenas and such it ain't much gun, is it?"

There was nobody around but me, nobody else in the world but me and a million animals and a thousand noises and the bright sun and the cool breeze and the shade from the big trees that made it cathedral-cool but a lot less musty and damp and full of century-old fear and trembling. I got to thinking that maybe this was what God had in mind when He invented religion, instead of all the don’t and must-nots and sins and confessions of sins. I got to thinking about all the big churches I had been in, including those in Rome, and how none of them could possibly compare with this place, with its brilliant birds and its soothing sounds of intense life all around and the feeling of ineffable peace and good will, so that not even man would be capable of behaving very badly in such a place. I thought that this was maybe the kind of place the Lord would come to sit in and get His strength back after a hard day's work trying to straighten out mankind. Certainly He wouldn't go inside a church. If the Lord was tired He would be uneasy inside a church.

If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them.

In order to understand Mau Mau it is first necessary to understand Africa, and the portion of Africa in which Mau Mau was allowed to flourish is only just fifty years old as we reckon civilization. To understand Africa you must understand a basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we "civilized" people have encountered in two centuries.

They learn all our bad habits. We destroy every bit of their old logical living because it conflicts with our law, and replace it with bleeding nothing. So now you have, excuse me, please, whores when once there was no such thing as prostitution, and robbers and spivs and sly loafers, because they've become detribalized without becoming decently citified.

I acquired a castle in Spain. The rain in Spain falls mainly on my brain, because the roof is porous.

[A]ny time a boy is ready to learn about guns is the time he’s ready, no matter how young he is, and you can’t start too young to learn how to be careful.

[A] man who catches fish or shoots game has got to make it fit to eat before he sleeps. Otherwise it’s all a waste and a sin to take it if you can’t use it.

Time just seems to fly away for a boy. That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and you ain’t a boy any longer.

If they keep exposing you to education, you might even realize some day that man becomes immortal only in what he writes on paper, or hacks into rock, or slabbers onto a canvas, or pulls out of a piano.

At least if you can laugh instead of cry the troubles will either kill you or go away, and it is a bit better to die laughing than to die crying.

The Old Man never held forth much on formal religion. He said he reckoned a man knew best what his own God was and how to work with Him, and he was never much of a reformer. He said he reckoned Somebody, no matter what name you called Him, was responsible for sun, moon, mountains, sea, stars, heat, cold, seasons, animals, birds, fish, and food—"even small boys, although that may have been a basic mistake"—and whether you called him God, Allah, Jehovah, or Mug-Mug didn't make much difference as long as you believed in Him.

On the sexes: "Man is a simple creature a very small boy who wants to be patted on the head and told he's a good boy and a nice boy and a smart boy. You can lead him anywhere. But as for women, I don't know. They got a sort of contrary, different chemistry of brain and action from men, which makes them unruly and subject to strange ts. My only advice on women is to stay out of the house when they're cleaning and don't say yes too often."

"Rich," the Old Man said dreamily, "is not baying after what you can't have. Rich is having the time to do what you want to do. Rich is a little whisky to drink and some food to eat and a roof over your head and a fish pole and a boat and a gun and a dollar for a box of shells. Rich is not owing any money to anybody, and not spending what you haven't got."

"If you pinned me right down to it," the Old Man said, "I don’t like nothing very much but a hot fire and a warm bed and a quiet woman to fetch me my food. I can generally manage the first two, but I been looking constantly for the basic ingredient of the third. Quiet, I mean."

The Old Man just claimed that the stature of the man was measured by how much he could smile when fate was beating him over the head with a stick.

There is a saying among the Masai of Africa—or maybe it's the Somali—that a brave man is frightened three times by a lion: when he first sees its track, when he first hears its roar, and when he first sees the lion in the flesh.

I reckon the years between forty and sixty are the best a man's apt to put in. He can do dang near anything as good as he could when he was a youngster, and what he can't jump over he's smart enough to walk around.

A man can build a staunch reputation for honesty by admitting he was in error, especially when he gets caught at it.

I bear scars on wrist and soul from being chewed by а leopard who would have been dead if my gun's ammunition had fulfilled its basic purpose. But we picked the buckshot out of the cat's hide like currants from a bun. I choked the leopard to death with the shotgun, which doesn't work anymore.

[T]hat commodity Ben Franklin trapped in a precursor to the Coca-Cola bottle.

Allegedly, electricity runs а variety of things, like vacuum cleaners that bust, television sets that explode, and lights that burn out. I admit its existence, but I don't really believe in it.

Another dissatisfied mortal writes: "I am reminded of a TV set that a company wanted me to try, free of charge, for a couple of months; the case was made of extruded white plastic, ugly as a Tasmanian devil, with a plastic white clock stuck on it like a second eye."

I have visited friends—reasonably affluent, and of dissimilar sexes—in what the real-estate racket calls "luxury housing," and have fled in horrified relief to a goathide tent in Timbuktu.

Some of the conversations from next door, upstairs and downstairs would make an interesting addendum for the memoirs of Christine Keeler. You can hear beds squeak all round; you can hear toilets flush. On a clear day, you can hear a cockroach belch.

I was sitting with a young lady one night, with the television turned up to drown out the screams of the rape victims, when a chap who was hanging a picture next door broke completely through the wall! And this, friends, in the high-rent district.

Only choice between the brand-spankers and the reconverts is to live in the suburbs, and that means trains. Oy vay. Trains. The trouble with train people is that they think they are still living in an early Harriman era. They think they are still in the railroad business.

[T]he cold consommé was hot and half-melted, the liver came straight out of a synthetic-testing lab, and the whipped cream on the strawberry shortcake was purest Rise. The strawberries were made of genuine artificial coloring.

We progress now by easy hysteria to plastics. I recently encountered а plastic fire shovel. As I attempted to remove some hot ashes from а fireplace which did draw—it was on a pre-Civil War Texas ranch—the fire shovel melted in my hands. The ranch had been newly refurnished, and the ashtrays were plastic, as well. I left a cigarette іп an ashtray—where else do you stick it, in your eаг?—and the ashtray melted and the cigarette set fire to the tablecloth. We will now dismiss plastics, because I'm beginning to quiver again.

In the food department, practically nothing remains constant except catsup.

Bread is aerated sawdust, painted ghostly white. It owns all the nutriment of a breath of its principal ingredient, air.

Apple pie? Nuuh-uh. In my time it was a delight, and I went to war for it and motherhood. But motherhood is obsolete, too, in the old-fashioned sense, and now apple pie is a slag heap of green apples jammed between two layers of Bakelite. What, oh what, ever happened to the slim slices that came cinnamon-drenched from the crusted deep-dish?

Restaurants? You stumble by accident, in search of a beer and а sammidge, into some dive and run onto the damnedest cuisine since the first cannibal discovered a recipe for braised missionary.

[M]odern sucker civilization, in which, basically, most things that are not worth doing are done badly.

In the libraries

Open Library Horn of the hunter · 1953 View library record ↗ Open Library Poor no more · 1959 View library record ↗ Open Library Something of value · 1955 View library record ↗ Open Library The Old Man and The Boy · 1953 View library record ↗ Open Library The honey badger · 1965 View library record ↗ Open Library Uhuru · 1962 View library record ↗

Read Robert Ruark

Uhuru 1962 Find a copy Something of value 1955 Find a copy The Old Man and The Boy 1953 Find a copy The honey badger 1965 Find a copy Poor no more 1959 Find a copy Horn of the hunter 1953 Find a copy