Norman Maclean Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

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.

Norman Maclean
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.

Norman Maclean
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.

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

Norman Maclean
"Help," he said "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly."

Norman Maclean
How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions.

Norman Maclean
The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.

Norman Maclean
Time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning.

Norman Maclean
Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.

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

Norman Maclean
We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

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

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

Norman Maclean
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

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

Norman Maclean
One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing

Norman Maclean
When exhausted and feeling sorry for yourself, at least change your socks.

Norman Maclean
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.

Norman Maclean
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 water joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.

Norman Maclean
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.

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

Norman Maclean
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.

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

Norman Maclean
When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.

Norman Maclean
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

Norman Maclean
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.

Norman Maclean
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.

Norman Maclean
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.

Norman Maclean
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.

Norman Maclean
Life every now and then becomes literature... as if life had been made and not happened.

Norman Maclean