20 Best Ed Tom Bell Quotes

Ed: Carla Jean, thank you for coming.
Carla: Don't know why I did. I told you, I don't know where he is.
Ed: You hadn't heard from him?
Carla: No, I ain't.
Ed: Nuthin'?
Carla: Not word one.
Ed: Would you tell me if you had?
Carla: Well, I don't know. He don't need any trouble from you.
Ed: It ain't me he's in trouble with.
Carla: Who's he in trouble with then?
Ed: Some pretty bad people. These people will kill him, Carla Jean. They won't quit.
Carla: He won't neither. He never has. He can take all comers.
Ed: [Ed Tom sighs heavily] You know Charlie Walser's, got that place out east of Sanderson? Well, you know how they used to slaughter beeves, hit 'em right there with a maul, truss 'em up and slit their throats? Here, ol' Charlie's got one all trussed up, all set to drain him and the beef comes to, starts thrashing around. Six hundred pounds of very pissed-off livestock. If you'll excuse the... Well... Charlie grabs the gun there, shoot the damn thing in the head, but with all the swingin' and the thrashin', it's a glance-shot, ricochets around, comes back and hits Charlie in the shoulder. You go see Charlie, he still can't pick up his right hand for his hat... The point bein', that even in the contest between man and steer, the issue is not certain.

Ed: Now that's aggravatin'.
Wendell: Sheriff?
Ed: [points to a bottle of milk] Still sweatin'.
Wendell: Whoa, Sheriff! We just missed him! We gotta circulate this! On Radio!
Ed: Alright. What we circulate? Lookin' for a man who has recently drunk milk?

Wendell: We goin' in?
Ed: Gun out and up.
Wendell: [Wendell draws his pistol] What about yours?
Ed: I'm hidin' behind you.

Ed: That man that shot you died in prison.
Ellis: Angola. Yeah...
Ed: What you'd done he had been released?
Ellis: Oh, I dunno. Nothing. Wouldn't be no point in it.
Ed: I'm kindly surprised to hear you say that.
Ellis: Well all the time ya spend trying to get back what's been took from ya, more is going out the door. After a while you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it. Your granddad never asked me to sign on as a deputy.

Wendell: You think this boy Moss has got any notion of the sorts of sons of bitches that're huntin' him?
Ed: I don't know, he ought to. He's seen the same things I've seen, and it's certainly made an impression on me.

Carla: Sheriff, was that a true story about Charlie Walser?
Ed: Who's Charlie Walser? Oh! Well... uh... a true story? I couldn't swear to every detail but it's certainly true that it is a story.

Ed: You ride Winston.
Wendell: You sure?
Ed: Oh, I'm sure. Anything happens to Loretta's horse, I can tell ya I don't want to be the party that was on board.

Wendell: You know, there might not have been no money.
Ed: That's possible.
Wendell: But you don't believe it.
Ed: No. Probably I don't.
Wendell: It's a mess, ain't it, sheriff?
Ed: If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here.

[first lines]
Ed: I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lotta folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough'd never carried one; that's the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn't wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how they would have operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I sure don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

Wendell: [Viewing the desert crime scene] It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?
Ed: If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here.

Loretta: Be careful.
Ed: I always am.
Loretta: Don't get hurt.
Ed: I never do.
Loretta: Don't hurt no one.
Ed: [smiles] Well. If you say so.

Ed: But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.

[last lines]
Loretta: How'd you sleep?
Ed: I don't know. Had dreams.
Loretta: Well you got time for 'em now. Anythin' interesting?
Ed: They always is to the party concerned.
Loretta: Ed Tom, I'll be polite.
Ed: Alright then. Two of 'em. Both had my father in 'em. It's peculiar. I'm older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he's the younger man. Anyway, first one I don't remember too well but it was about meeting him in town somewhere, he's gonna give me some money. I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin' through the mountains of a night. Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up...

El: Yea, well, none of that explains your man though.
Ed: Uh-huh.
El: He's just a goddamn homicidal lunatic, Ed Tom.
Ed: I'm not sure he's a lunatic.
El: Yeah ,well what would you call him?
Ed: Well, sometimes I think he's pretty much a ghost.
El: Oh, he's real all right.
Ed: Oh yeah.
El: Yeah, all that over at the Eagle Hotel? Huh, it's beyond everything.
Ed: Yeah. Got some hard bark on him.
El: Well - well, that don't hardly say it. He shoots the desk clerk one day, walks right back in the next and shoots a retired army colonel.
Ed: It's hard to believe.
El: Just strolls right back into a crime scene. Now, who'd do such a thing? How do you defend against it?

Ed: How many of those things you got now?
Ellis: Cats? Several. Well, depends what you mean by got. Some are half-wild and some are just outlaws.

Ed: [talking to Ellis] I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come inta my life somehow. And he didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I would have the same opinion of me that he does.

Wendell: That's very linear, Sheriff.
Ed: Well, age will flatten a man.

El: What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.
Ed: Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.
El: Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.

Wendell: [referring to the dead bodies in the desert] How come you reckon the coyotes ain't been at them?
Ed: I don't know. Supposedly, a coyote won't eat a Mexican.

Ed: Here last week they found this couple out in California. They rent out rooms for old people, kill' em, bury' em in the yard, cash their social security checks. Well, they'd torture 'em first. I don't know why. Maybe the television set was broke.