Norman Maclean - A River Runs Through It (1976)

28 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

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

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

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

Norman Maclean
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.

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
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
Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Norman Maclean
Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.

Norman Maclean
My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

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

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

Norman Maclean