Norman Maclean Quotes - Page 2

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me.

It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling.

I am haunted by waters.

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.

We sat on the bank and the river went by. As always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us. It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying.

...life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.

How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions.

Probably most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died...,those who loved them forever questioning "this unnecessary death," and the rest of us tiring of this inconsolable catastrophe and turning to the next one.

When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.

If our father had had his way, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.

He told us about Christ's disciples being fisherman, and we were left to assume...that all great fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fisherman and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.

The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.