Norman Maclean Quotes

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. 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. So what I saw because of what I knew was a kind of death with the marvellous promise of less than a three-day resurrection.

You can love completely without complete understanding.

What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was.

In 1949 the Smokejumpers were still so young that they referred affectionately to all fires they jumped on as “ten o’clock fires,” as if they already had them under control before they jumped. They were still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.

"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.

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

It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.

God Is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.

Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear

That's how you know when you have thought too much — when you become a dialogue between You'll probably lose and You're sure to lose.

For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us - excitedly finding we were wrong and excitedly waiting for tomorrow to come so we can start over.

It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.

Painted on one side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.

Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

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