Norman Maclean Short Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.

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
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
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
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