A collection of my favorite lines from every episode of 1883, Taylor Sheridan’s masterpiece from the Yellowstone universe. This show is basically Lonesome Dove for women, but I’d be an asshole if I reduced it to only that. It’s so much more, it touches you, speaks to you, fondles, consoles, caresses, pulls, tugs, hits you, stabs you, and kills you from every angle to make you feel the entirety of the “human experience.” Good writing. Don’t scroll to the end if you don’t want major spoilers.
s1e1
Sorry about Henry. He was a patient man.
Can’t be sorry. It’s the lord’s will. Can’t believe in heaven and then be sad when people go there.
There’s hot water in the lobby?
There’s hot water in the lobby.
I read about a hotel in New York where they pipe hot water straight into your room. Turn the faucet on and it comes riiiight out! Can you imagine that?
(He’s a non-alcoholic, who doesn’t gamble, doesn’t dance, and is sitting in a pub)
So you sit here and drink your drink that isn’t a drink, and you sit here and watch people do things that you don’t do.
So much I don’t know about life. We learn to read, we learn rules, learn scriptures and manners, and how to avoid saying and doing things that make others uncomfortable. But all of these things seem the opposite of life. Seem to strangle it. But now I’m sleeping on the edge of civilization. And soon we leave the edge behind. Then no rules. Then only life.
What in the hell is a to-ah-lette?
It’s French for shitter.
When did you learn French?
I don’t know French, I just know the French word for shitter.
How do you know the French word for shitter?
I used to fuck a girl from France!
Fine, that’s all you had to say. Don’t have to get angry about it.
Where (will we camp) on the Trinity?
There’s a big oak, bend over like an old woman. Big boulder up against the trunk. Looks like it’s crying over a grave. Meet you there.
(See how they described places and landmarks? You’d use your brain to create an image of what the other person said, then go and look for the picture in your head.)
I remember stories of the great war, how it seemed man had lost all reason. How we’d become animals. Or perhaps we’d surrendered to the fact that animals is all we’d ever been. But there are moments where I feel we are more. Where we have evolved beyond the search for the next meal. Or the dominance to breed who we choose. Where we breathe fresh air deep and can almost taste its maker.
(You gotta hear it in Elsa’s voice though. How she intonates (this is the verb form of ‘intonation’ that I just made up) “taste its maker” in her I-want-to-keep-hearing-you-say-things husky voice)
I wish I could freeze this moment. I would live in it forever. Swimming in the possible, while the mud of the real is stuck to the shore. (…aaaand closeup shot as she steps off the off the mud of the riverbank and dips her toes into the water. Wow.)
We weren’t poor. We weren’t desperate. The road west is filled with failures. But failure isn’t what drove him. It was a dream. And the dream is coming true.
(That’s John Fucking Dutton for ya.)
s1e2
There ain’t no one to hire.
Then we don’t go.
You can stay. I’m going.
I wanna see it one last time. Before it’s settled. Before it’s ruined.
(The north. Montana.)
After you see it, then what?
The world can open up and eat me. I don’t give a shit.
(Elsa while looking out at Texas after rounding up wild cattle)
Freedom. To most it is an idea. An abstract thought that pertains to control. That’s not freedom. That’s independence. Freedom is riding wild over untamed land, with no notion any moment exists, beyond the one you’re living.
(The sheriff after wiping out a gang in a house-full bar)
If you want to dance with the girls? Dance with the girls. If you want to drink at the bar? Drink at the bar. But if anybody here fancies himself a gunman, you’re in the wrong town. There’s only one killer in Fort Worth and that’s me.
I’ve painted a picture of my husband in my mind… He don’t look like you.
Well, I’m a cowboy, ma’am, we don’t look like nobody’s husband. But we’re the ones you think about when your husband ain’t around.
What began as a journey had become a retreat. Into the unknown. We were backing into the abyss, so worried our sins would follow us, we didn’t bother watching where we walked. And behind us was a cliff.
s1e3
Death is everywhere on the prairie. In every form you can imagine. And a few your worst nightmare couldn’t muster.
(I swear to god. Seriously man, people just keep fucking dying for whatever reason. Got shot by bandits. Killed himself. Killed herself because her daughter got shot. Got trampled under a wagon wheel while trying to get it out of a ditch. Caught smallpox. Stole somebody’s wallet. Broke the law in an almost lawless land. Fell off a wagon. Got torn apart by a wild dog. Got bit in the ass by a snake while taking a shit.)
(Grave-digging’s a big part of their day-to-day.)
With every death, our father moved camp a little farther away. As if death was not the result of accidents and disease; but death was its own disease. And carelessness was contagious.
(Wife puts son into the husband’s hands right when he makes plans to go hunting)
How am I supposed to sneak up on something with a five year old?
Teach him to be quiet or find a dumb deer.
It’s better to double the latigo with him.
Girl, I’ve forgotten more about horses than you’ll ever know.
When there’s two leaders… There’s no leader. Know what I mean?
The more fires folks see, the less chance they come to our camp seeing what else they can find.
What happened to her?
She want’s to marry me.
Guessing you said no… or you said yes, and she already regrets it.
No time for jokes, Thomas, she’s having a hard time of it.
Hard times is the only kind out here captain. And laughing through em is how you get through em. And I ain’t jokin. She’s lucky as hell she ain’t marrying your sour ass. She what I did there? Joke, on top of a joke.
Yeah, real funny.
When you get to Portland, some handsome farmer’s gonna spot you in town, take one look at em big eyes you got, and he’s gonna chase you down the street with flowers and candy. You watch. Don’t wanna be marrying out of fear. You’ll get by out here just fine. We’ll get you by. Then, let a man earn your love, instead of you trading him for it.
When I speak, and you don’t do what I say, you get hurt. That’s the pattern here and it don’t stop until you do what I say, or you run out of face.
Kinda mean the way she does it, but she is flirtin. Woo-hoo!
(John and the kid out hunting, looking for a deer, on horseback)
Am I being quiet?
Yeah, you were being quiet, now you’re talking.
Sorry.
Can you see anything?
Shhh.
Can we whisper?
We can’t talk at all coz they’ll hear us.
Can’t they hear the horse?
They can hear the horse, they’re just not scared of it.
How come?
Well, coz horses don’t shoot deer.
But we’re on a horse, and we shoot deer.
Well, that’s why we gotta be quiet.
But can’t deer see us on the horse?
They can see us on the horse, they just don’t understand it.
They don’t understand we’re sitting on a horse?
They don’t understand why we’re sitting on a horse.
If they understood why we’re sitting on a horse, they’d head for the hills. Course, we’re in the hills, so that wouldn’t do em much good.
Dammit John, be quiet.
(Kid starts crying loudly.
LMAO I love kids.)
(After hunting, to the kid): You took a life to give us life. So now we say thank you.
When you kill a thing, son, it makes you a little less man, a little more animal. Now we try to find the balance between em. That’s all life is.
The world doesn’t care if you die. It won’t listen to your screams. If you bleed on the ground, the ground will drink it. It doesn’t care that you’re cut. I told myself, when I meet god, it’ll be the first thing I ask him: Why make a world of such wonder and fill it with monsters? Why make flowers and then snakes to hide beneath them. What purpose does the tornado serve? Then it hit me: he didn’t make it for us.
s1e4
There is no greater fear than the unknown.
(Black man:) That’s because you never been whipped.
s1e5
What a weird thing, kissing.
(After she’s had sex for the first time, when her mom tells her to ask the father if he’ll raise the child with her:) I don’t regret it, mama.
(Mom:) Just once I’d love to see the world through your eyes. One day you’ll see it through mine, though. And it breaks my heart.
I’d known death since I was a child. It’s everywhere. But it had never touched me. It had never placed its rotten finger on my heart. Until today. Today my eyes died. I see the world through my mother’s eyes now.
s1e6
(She cries so much)
What’s the purpose of pain? I understand desire and fear. But why pain? What purpose does it serve?
An apache scout told me once, when you love someone, you trade souls with them. They get a piece of yours, and you get a piece of theirs. But when your love dies, a little piece of you dies with them. That’s why you hurt so bad. But that little piece of him is still inside you. And he can use your eyes to see the world. So… I’m taking my wife to the ocean. And I’m gonna sit on the beach, and let her see it. That was her dream. Then I’m gonna see her. That’s my dream.
(God fucking what a beautiful score.)
(After the gun-pulling fiasco Elsa creates, John, still pointing his gun at the dude:)
I don’t wanna be wasting my time looking over my shoulder for you.
(People will follow and kill over the littlest things.)
(They used to buy hundred-pound blocks of ice and store them down wells for months!)
Stars for a blanket, ground for a bed, good horse, open country. That’s all a cowboy needs.
Further away you Get from concrete. The more worthless those pretty things become.
By the end of that battle, I’d killed so many men, I couldn’t’ remember what that boy looked like.
s1e7
The best way to know if land is truly undiscovered… is to seek words to describe it. When you can’t, you know it’s virgin land untouched by our dirty hands.
(Why you gotta make humans bad every time? It was fine up until describe it.)
(Plains are littered with bones like in Lonesome Dove.)
Got chased by a tornado and lost a girl to an injun at the same time.
Gotta have it to lose it, partner.
I admit, I might have overestimated my appeal.
Watching Sam kill, was like watching a lion hurl itself into a deer. His fury was so magnificent. There was no time for horror. Not even for the men he killed.
(The West’s Five Great Pleasures:
- Killing Cattle Thieves
- Horse
- Sunrise from the saddle
- Riding the wild country
- ???)
s1e8
I understood my mother’s worry. My choices make no sense in her world, where customs and prejudice rule, where law cannot reach. There will be customs and prejudice here too, I’m sure. But they were born of this world and belong in it. To import the traditions of the place you fled, the place that failed you, is to condemn the place you seek with the same failures.
(Comanches break horses in the water.)
(Comanche says to her dad when he asks how will he find him:)
White men think the world is so big because you fight against it when you travel. We move with it like the wolf. It is small to us.
s1e9
I will never live in that world again… Where the weak would rather guilt the strong, than become strong themselves. No. I will stay in this world. This world doesn’t care what the weak want. This world eats the weak.
As my father would say, the one good thing about problems, they’ll still be problems later. Don’t have to deal with them right away.
s1e10
What is death? What is this thing we all share? Rabbits, birds, horses, trees… Everyone I love, and everyone who loves me. Even stars die… And we know absolutely nothing of it.
Go back to Texas, you pretty son of a bitch.
Another future awaited them, and it lay in the abyss of unmarked graves along the Oregon trail.
(Cut a guy’s snake-bit leg off, then casually sit by the fire talking with your daughter while your wife cooks her a quick snack. That’s the life.)
(I notice how they’re talking to each other differently now… because they all know she’s dying, and they all know that they all know (when Elsa says ‘went from prairie to pine trees in a day.’)
To survive the frontier, you must learn to recognize those who won’t, and be weary of their doomed decisions. They’re to be avoided at all costs, because their fear is tragedy’s closest cousin… and tragedy is contagious in this place.
(I’m glad Elsa didn’t die suddenly and that the story built up to it gradually.)
