Norman Maclean Quotes
-
I am haunted by waters.
→ -
The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.
→ -
Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.
→ -
My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout as well as eternal salvation-come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.
→ -
So it is that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.
→ -
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.
→ -
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
→ -
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.
→ -
A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.
→ -
One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.
→ -
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. You can love completely without complete understanding.
→ -
Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.
→ -
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.
→ -
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.
→ -
I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me.
→ -
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.
→ -
How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions.
→ -
As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.
→ -
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
→ -
Many of us would probably be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect
→ -
Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
→ -
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.
→ -
We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.
→ -
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.
→ -
At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.
→ -
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.
→ -
I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.
→
Related Authors
-
Saul Bellow Writer -
David James Duncan Novelist -
Tom Skerritt Actor -
Lawrence Kohlberg Psychologist -
Brad Pitt Actor -
Brenda Blethyn Actress -
Craig Sheffer Film actor -
Mircea Eliade Historian -
Leon Kass Scientist -
Robert Redford Actor -
Albert A. Michelson Physicist -
Robert M. Pirsig Writer -
Wallace Stegner Historian -
William Kittredge Writer -
Robert Greene American author -
Emily Lloyd Film actress -
-
David Deida Author -
Joseph Gordon-Levitt Actor -
Ivan Doig Novelist