Norman Maclean Quotes

"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.

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.

In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them.

"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."

You can love completely without complete understanding.

At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.

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.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

It’s hard enough to find out about the things the universe prefers to keep hidden without our government, which somebody you know must have voted for, covering up what has already been found. Sometimes, of course, it hides things to save its own neck and sometimes seemingly just for the hell of it.

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

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.

Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.

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.

The brain gives up a lot less easily than the body.

"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.