Thomas McGuane Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.

Thomas McGuane
We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.

Thomas McGuane
The mountains paralleled the valley and the snowy peaks were extending with fall to the valley floor.

Thomas McGuane
Early on I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included.

Thomas McGuane
Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives. Time does not seem to be of the essence and somewhere in the system is what they are looking for.

Thomas McGuane
Something had gone amiss with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.

Thomas McGuane
Angling is extremely time consuming. That's sort of the whole point.

Thomas McGuane
By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

Thomas McGuane
I had just settled Grandma on her folding chair and popped open our box lunch when the corpse floated by.

Thomas McGuane
I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either ethical or geographical. The Bible tells us to watch and listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.

Thomas McGuane
The trouble is, you can't properly present something you don't believe in.

Thomas McGuane
In the future, I mean to be a fine streamside entomologist. I'm going to start on that when I am much too old to do any of the two thousand things I can think of that are more fun than screening insects in cold running water

Thomas McGuane
We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity's demand upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a river-keeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.

Thomas McGuane