Norman Maclean Quotes

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

If Socrates had been foreman on the Mann Gulch fire, he and his crew would have been cremated while they were sitting there considering it.

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.

I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself.

To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy

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 world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.

Old Rawhide woke up and handed Paul the bottle of 3-7-77. “Have a snort,” she said. Paul took her hand and moved it around to where she was offering the drink to Neal. As I said, for several reasons, including our father, Paul and I did not drink when we fished. Afterwards, yes, in fact, as soon as our wet clothes were off and we could stand on them instead of the pine needles one of us would reach for the glove compartment in the car where we always carried a bottle.

If you think what I am about to tell you next is a contradiction to this, then you will have to realize that in Montana drinking beer does not count as drinking.

Paul opened the trunk of our car and counted out eight bottles of beer.

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.

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 whole that is different from the sum of its parts.

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

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

Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. “So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “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. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.

He himself has thinned out to the vanishing point of being only decisions once made that he can't do anything about ever after.

I had long ago learned, sometimes to my sorrow, that Scottish piety is accompanied by a complete foreknowledge of sin. That's what we mean by original sin — we don't have to do it to know about it.