Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove

by

Larry McMurtry

Lorena Wood Character Analysis

Lorena Wood is a sex worker who lives at the Dry Bean Saloon in Lonesome Dove. Born in Alabama, she started traveling west at the age of 12, first with her parents and then—after their deaths—in the company of disreputable and dishonorable men like Mosby and John Tinkersley. In Lonesome Dove, Augustus McCrae takes a shine to Lorena, as do cowboy Dish Boggett and saloon proprietor Xavier Wanz; any of the three would happily marry her. But it’s Jake Spoon who charms her with promises to take her to San Francisco and then lets her down on the cattle drive. Still, despite these challenges, Lorena mostly maintains a cheerful outlook on life, at least until Blue Duck abducts her and Ermoke, Dog Face, Monkey John, and others subject her to horrific abuse. Gus rescues her, after which she becomes wholly devoted to and dependent on him. Nevertheless, when Clara invites her to stay in Nebraska rather than accompany the drive all the way to Montana, Lorena accepts. She finds love and friendship for the first time in many years in the context of the Allen family. Learning about Gus’s death breaks her heart again, and when Call brings his body south via Clara’s home, Lorena stands vigil over his coffin all night. She leaves his side only after she faints, and Dish and July carry her inside.

Lorena Wood Quotes in Lonesome Dove

The Lonesome Dove quotes below are all either spoken by Lorena Wood or refer to Lorena Wood. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
American Mythology Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

“Say you put two dollars as your low figure,” he said. “That’s for the well-barbered sprout. What would the high figure be, for some big rank waddy who couldn’t even spell? The pint I’m making is that all men ain’t the same, so they shouldn’t be the same price, or am I wrong? Maybe from where you sit all men are the same.”

Once she thought about it, Lorena saw his point. All men weren’t quite the same. A few were nice enough that might notice them, and a goodly few were mean enough that she couldn’t help noticing them, but the majority were neither one nor the other. They were just men, and they left money, not memories. So far it was only the mean ones who had left memories.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae (speaker), Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon, Mosby , John Tinkersley
Page Number: 42-43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 21 Quotes

But when he raised up on one elbow to look at her in the fresh light, the urge to discourage her went away. It was a weakness, but he could not bear to disappoint women, even if it was ultimately for their own good. At least he couldn’t disappoint them to their faces. Leaving them was his only out, and he knew he wasn’t ready to leave Lorie. Her beauty blew the sleep right out of his brain […]. She didn’t own a decent dress, and had nothing to show her beauty to advantage, yet most of the men on the border would ride thirty miles just to sit in a saloon and stare at her. […] The thought struck him that the two of them might do well in San Francisco, if they could just get there. There were men of wealth there, and Lorie’s beauty would soon attract them.

Related Characters: Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon, Mosby , John Tinkersley
Page Number: 201
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

They had unpacked in the dark and made a mess of it. […] It was plain camping wasn’t a neat way of life. There was no place to wash, and they were carrying very little water, which was the main reason she had refused Jake. She liked a wash and felt he could wait until they camped near a river and could splash a little of the dust off before bedding down.

Augustus watched them eat the poor burned breakfast. It was eternally amusing to him, the flow of human behavior. Who could have predicted Jake would be the one to take Lorena out of Lonesome Dove? She had been meaning to leave since the day she arrived, and now Jake, who had slipped from the grasp of every woman who had known him, was firmly caught by a young whore from Alabama.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon
Page Number: 215
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 45 Quotes

“Yes, that’s your problem,” he said. “You don’t like buttermilk, or nothing else. You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.”

“I want to get to San Francisco,” Lorena said. “It’s cool, they say.”

“You’d be better off if you could just enjoy a poke every once in a while,” Augustus said, taking one of her hands and smoothing her fingers. “Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”

Lorena didn’t answer. She shut her eyes and let Gus hold her hand. She was afraid he would try more […] but he didn’t. It was a very still morning. Gus seemed content to hold her hand and sit quietly.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae (speaker), Lorena Wood (speaker), Captain Woodrow Call, Jake Spoon, Mosby , John Tinkersley
Page Number: 350
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 46 Quotes

“You broke her heart,” Gus said, many times.

“What are you talking about,” Call said. “She was a whore.”

“Whores got hearts,” Augustus said.

The bitter truth was that Gus was right. Maggie hadn’t even seemed like a whore. There was nothing hard about her—in fact, it was obvious to everyone that she was far too soft for the life she was living. She had tender expressions—more tender than any he had ever seen. He could still remember her movements—those more than her words. She could never quite get her hair to stay fixed, and was always touching it nervously with one hand. “It won’t behave,” she said, as if her hair were a child.

“You take care of her, if you’re so worried,” he said to Gus, but Gus shrugged that off. “She ain’t in love with me, she’s in love with you,” he pointed out.

Related Characters: Captain Woodrow Call (speaker), Augustus McCrae (speaker), Lorena Wood, Blue Duck , Maggie
Page Number: 362
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 54 Quotes

Of course they had heard that the buffalo were being wiped out, but with the memory of the southern herd so vivid, they had hardly credited the news. Discussing it […] they had decided that the reports must be exaggerated […] Thus the sight of the road of bones stretching over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel. With those millions of animals gone, and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed.

Soon whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants—of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Blue Duck , Aus Frank
Page Number: 434
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 58 Quotes

July didn’t want to see it. He knew he had to, but he didn’t want to.

He felt a terrible need to turn things back, all the way back to the time when he and Roscoe and Joe and Elmira had all been in Arkansas. He knew it could never be. Something had happened which he would never be free of. He had even lost the chance to stay and die with his people, though Captain McCrae had offered him that chance. “I’d feel better in my mind if you’d stay with your part,” he had said.

He had not stayed, but when he had gone, he hadn’t fought, either. He had done nothing but ride twice over the same stretch of prairie, while death had come to both camps.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Blue Duck , July Johnson, Elmira, Roscoe Brown, Janey , Joe Boot
Page Number: 462
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 59 Quotes

The thought that Gus was dead began to weigh on Call. It came to him several times a day, at moments, and made him feel empty and strange. They had not had much of a talk before Gus left. Nothing much had been said. He began to wish that somehow things could have been rounded off a little better. Of course he knew death was no respecter. People just dropped when they dropped, whether they had rounded things off or not. Still, it haunted him that Gus had just ridden off and might not ride back. He would look over the cattle herd strung out across the prairie and feel that it was all worthless, and a little absurd. Some days he almost felt like turning the cattle loose and paying off the crew. He could take Pea and Deets and maybe the boy and they would look for Gus until they found him.

Related Characters: Captain Woodrow Call, Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Newt, Blue Duck , Deets, Pea Eye
Page Number: 469
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 60 Quotes

“Because of Jake we lost ’em both, I guess,” Dish said. “Jake is a god-damn bastard.”

It was painful to Newt to have to think of Jake that way. He still remembered how Jake had played with him when he was a little child, and that Jake had made his mother get a lively, merry look in her eyes. All the years Jake had been gone, Newt had remembered him fondly and supposed that if he ever did come back he would be a hero. But it had to be admitted that Jake’s behavior since his return had not been heroic at all. It bordered on the cowardly, particularly his casual return to card playing once Lorena had been stolen.

Related Characters: Dish Boggett (speaker), Captain Woodrow Call, Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon, Newt, Blue Duck , Sally Skull
Page Number: 471-472
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 88 Quotes

“You beat any woman I ever saw for talking the starch out of a man,” he said, a little perplexed. Despite all the complication, he felt his old love for her returning with its old power. So much feeling flooded him, just looking at her, that he felt shaky. It was a puzzle to him that such a thing could happen, for it was true she had become rather boney and her face had thinned too much, and certainly she was as taxing as a woman could be. And yet the feeling made him shaky.

“Think I’m rough, Gus?” she asked with a smile.

“I ain’t been scorched by lightning, but I doubt it could be hotter than being scorched by you,” he said.

“Still think you’d have been up to being married to me?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae (speaker), Clara Allen (speaker), Lorena Wood, Po Campo , Bob Allen
Page Number: 705-706
Explanation and Analysis:

Sitting in the kitchen with the girls and the baby, Lorena felt happy in a way that was new to her. It stirred in her distant memories of the days she had spent in her grandmother’s house in Mobile when she was four. […] It was her happiest memory, one she treasured so, that in her years of travelling she grew almost afraid to remember it […] She was very afraid of losing her one good, warm memory. […]

But in Clara’s house she wasn’t afraid to remember her grandmother and the softness of the bed. Clara’s house was the kind of house she thought she might live in some day—at least she had hoped to when she was little. But […] she had started living in hotels or little rooms. She slowly stopped thinking of nice houses and the things that went with them, such as little girls and babies.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Clara Allen , Sally Allen , Betsey Allen , Mosby , John Tinkersley, Martin
Page Number: 707
Explanation and Analysis:
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Lonesome Dove PDF

Lorena Wood Quotes in Lonesome Dove

The Lonesome Dove quotes below are all either spoken by Lorena Wood or refer to Lorena Wood. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
American Mythology Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

“Say you put two dollars as your low figure,” he said. “That’s for the well-barbered sprout. What would the high figure be, for some big rank waddy who couldn’t even spell? The pint I’m making is that all men ain’t the same, so they shouldn’t be the same price, or am I wrong? Maybe from where you sit all men are the same.”

Once she thought about it, Lorena saw his point. All men weren’t quite the same. A few were nice enough that might notice them, and a goodly few were mean enough that she couldn’t help noticing them, but the majority were neither one nor the other. They were just men, and they left money, not memories. So far it was only the mean ones who had left memories.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae (speaker), Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon, Mosby , John Tinkersley
Page Number: 42-43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 21 Quotes

But when he raised up on one elbow to look at her in the fresh light, the urge to discourage her went away. It was a weakness, but he could not bear to disappoint women, even if it was ultimately for their own good. At least he couldn’t disappoint them to their faces. Leaving them was his only out, and he knew he wasn’t ready to leave Lorie. Her beauty blew the sleep right out of his brain […]. She didn’t own a decent dress, and had nothing to show her beauty to advantage, yet most of the men on the border would ride thirty miles just to sit in a saloon and stare at her. […] The thought struck him that the two of them might do well in San Francisco, if they could just get there. There were men of wealth there, and Lorie’s beauty would soon attract them.

Related Characters: Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon, Mosby , John Tinkersley
Page Number: 201
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

They had unpacked in the dark and made a mess of it. […] It was plain camping wasn’t a neat way of life. There was no place to wash, and they were carrying very little water, which was the main reason she had refused Jake. She liked a wash and felt he could wait until they camped near a river and could splash a little of the dust off before bedding down.

Augustus watched them eat the poor burned breakfast. It was eternally amusing to him, the flow of human behavior. Who could have predicted Jake would be the one to take Lorena out of Lonesome Dove? She had been meaning to leave since the day she arrived, and now Jake, who had slipped from the grasp of every woman who had known him, was firmly caught by a young whore from Alabama.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon
Page Number: 215
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 45 Quotes

“Yes, that’s your problem,” he said. “You don’t like buttermilk, or nothing else. You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.”

“I want to get to San Francisco,” Lorena said. “It’s cool, they say.”

“You’d be better off if you could just enjoy a poke every once in a while,” Augustus said, taking one of her hands and smoothing her fingers. “Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”

Lorena didn’t answer. She shut her eyes and let Gus hold her hand. She was afraid he would try more […] but he didn’t. It was a very still morning. Gus seemed content to hold her hand and sit quietly.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae (speaker), Lorena Wood (speaker), Captain Woodrow Call, Jake Spoon, Mosby , John Tinkersley
Page Number: 350
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 46 Quotes

“You broke her heart,” Gus said, many times.

“What are you talking about,” Call said. “She was a whore.”

“Whores got hearts,” Augustus said.

The bitter truth was that Gus was right. Maggie hadn’t even seemed like a whore. There was nothing hard about her—in fact, it was obvious to everyone that she was far too soft for the life she was living. She had tender expressions—more tender than any he had ever seen. He could still remember her movements—those more than her words. She could never quite get her hair to stay fixed, and was always touching it nervously with one hand. “It won’t behave,” she said, as if her hair were a child.

“You take care of her, if you’re so worried,” he said to Gus, but Gus shrugged that off. “She ain’t in love with me, she’s in love with you,” he pointed out.

Related Characters: Captain Woodrow Call (speaker), Augustus McCrae (speaker), Lorena Wood, Blue Duck , Maggie
Page Number: 362
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 54 Quotes

Of course they had heard that the buffalo were being wiped out, but with the memory of the southern herd so vivid, they had hardly credited the news. Discussing it […] they had decided that the reports must be exaggerated […] Thus the sight of the road of bones stretching over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel. With those millions of animals gone, and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed.

Soon whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants—of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Blue Duck , Aus Frank
Page Number: 434
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 58 Quotes

July didn’t want to see it. He knew he had to, but he didn’t want to.

He felt a terrible need to turn things back, all the way back to the time when he and Roscoe and Joe and Elmira had all been in Arkansas. He knew it could never be. Something had happened which he would never be free of. He had even lost the chance to stay and die with his people, though Captain McCrae had offered him that chance. “I’d feel better in my mind if you’d stay with your part,” he had said.

He had not stayed, but when he had gone, he hadn’t fought, either. He had done nothing but ride twice over the same stretch of prairie, while death had come to both camps.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Blue Duck , July Johnson, Elmira, Roscoe Brown, Janey , Joe Boot
Page Number: 462
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 59 Quotes

The thought that Gus was dead began to weigh on Call. It came to him several times a day, at moments, and made him feel empty and strange. They had not had much of a talk before Gus left. Nothing much had been said. He began to wish that somehow things could have been rounded off a little better. Of course he knew death was no respecter. People just dropped when they dropped, whether they had rounded things off or not. Still, it haunted him that Gus had just ridden off and might not ride back. He would look over the cattle herd strung out across the prairie and feel that it was all worthless, and a little absurd. Some days he almost felt like turning the cattle loose and paying off the crew. He could take Pea and Deets and maybe the boy and they would look for Gus until they found him.

Related Characters: Captain Woodrow Call, Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Newt, Blue Duck , Deets, Pea Eye
Page Number: 469
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 60 Quotes

“Because of Jake we lost ’em both, I guess,” Dish said. “Jake is a god-damn bastard.”

It was painful to Newt to have to think of Jake that way. He still remembered how Jake had played with him when he was a little child, and that Jake had made his mother get a lively, merry look in her eyes. All the years Jake had been gone, Newt had remembered him fondly and supposed that if he ever did come back he would be a hero. But it had to be admitted that Jake’s behavior since his return had not been heroic at all. It bordered on the cowardly, particularly his casual return to card playing once Lorena had been stolen.

Related Characters: Dish Boggett (speaker), Captain Woodrow Call, Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Jake Spoon, Newt, Blue Duck , Sally Skull
Page Number: 471-472
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 88 Quotes

“You beat any woman I ever saw for talking the starch out of a man,” he said, a little perplexed. Despite all the complication, he felt his old love for her returning with its old power. So much feeling flooded him, just looking at her, that he felt shaky. It was a puzzle to him that such a thing could happen, for it was true she had become rather boney and her face had thinned too much, and certainly she was as taxing as a woman could be. And yet the feeling made him shaky.

“Think I’m rough, Gus?” she asked with a smile.

“I ain’t been scorched by lightning, but I doubt it could be hotter than being scorched by you,” he said.

“Still think you’d have been up to being married to me?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae (speaker), Clara Allen (speaker), Lorena Wood, Po Campo , Bob Allen
Page Number: 705-706
Explanation and Analysis:

Sitting in the kitchen with the girls and the baby, Lorena felt happy in a way that was new to her. It stirred in her distant memories of the days she had spent in her grandmother’s house in Mobile when she was four. […] It was her happiest memory, one she treasured so, that in her years of travelling she grew almost afraid to remember it […] She was very afraid of losing her one good, warm memory. […]

But in Clara’s house she wasn’t afraid to remember her grandmother and the softness of the bed. Clara’s house was the kind of house she thought she might live in some day—at least she had hoped to when she was little. But […] she had started living in hotels or little rooms. She slowly stopped thinking of nice houses and the things that went with them, such as little girls and babies.

Related Characters: Augustus McCrae, Lorena Wood, Clara Allen , Sally Allen , Betsey Allen , Mosby , John Tinkersley, Martin
Page Number: 707
Explanation and Analysis: