Quotes from Norman Maclean

All there is to thinking, he said, is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

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.

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.

It would be hard to know what gigantic proportion of human life is spent in this same ratio of years under water on legs to one premature, exhausted moment on wings.

When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a while that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again.

dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains

But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory.

Nella nostra famiglia non c'era una chiara linea di demarcazione tra religione e pesca a mosca.

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

Mio padre possedeva sicurezze incrollabili su certe faccende inerenti all'universo. Per lui, tutte le cose buone – dalle trote alla salute eterna – derivavano dalla grazia, e la grazia dall'arte, e l'arte non è una cosa facile.

Avevamo in comune un'importante teoria sulle risse: quando pare che stia per scoppiarne una, mena per primo.

My collection of stories is called A River Runs Through It, and they are love stories: stories of my love of craft—of what men and women can do with their hands—and of my love of seeing life turn into literature.

It was a beautiful stretch of water, either to a fisherman or a photographer, although each would have focused his equipment on a different point. It was a barely submerged waterfall. The reef of rock was about two feet under the water, so the whole river rose into one wave, shook itself into spray, then fell back on itself and turned blue. After it recovered from the shock, it came back to see how it had fallen.

all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

Life every now and then becomes literature [...] 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.

To others in my family, the dog was something of a sacred object that had prolonged my father's life and helped to steady the rest of us. He was a fine dog, and after him, my father had no other dog.

She was never to ask me a question about the man she loved most and understood least. Perhaps she knew enough to know that for her it was enough to have loved him.

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 clear to me now that the universe in its truculence doesn't permit itself to be that well known.

After I caught these two, I quit. They made ten, and the last three were the finest fish I ever caught. They weren't the biggest or most spectacular fish I ever caught, but they were three fish I caught because my brother waded across the river to give me the fly that would catch them and because they were the last fish I ever caught fishing with him. After

Anyone who has done seasonal work knows that as regular as the seasons themselves is the return of this feeling at the end of each season, It's time to quit. It's time to quit.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.

I am haunted by waters.