Norman Maclean Quotes & Sayings

Indirectly, though, he was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. "You like to tell true stories, don't you?" he asked, and I answered, "Yes, I like to tell stories that are true." Then he asked, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? "Only then will you understand what happened and why. "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us." 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 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 nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself. — 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 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

If you push me far enough, all I really know is that he was a fine fisherman."
"You know more than that," my father said. "He was beautiful. — Norman Maclean

Dear Jesse, as the moon lingers a moment over the bitterroots, before its descent into the invisible, my mind is filled with song. I find I am humming softly; not to the music, but something else; some place else; a place remembered; a field of grass where no one seemed to have been; except a deer; and the memory is strengthened by the feeling of you, dancing in my awkward arms. — Norman Maclean

I am haunted by waters. — 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

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

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. — 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

If he comes back," she nodded. I thought I saw tears in her eyes but I was mistaken. In all my life, I was never to see her cry. And also he was never to come back. Without interrupting each other, we both said at the same time, "Let's never get out of touch with each other." And we never have, although her death has come between us. — Norman Maclean

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

Help," he said, "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. "So it is," he said, using an old homiletic transition, "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. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, 'Sorry, we are just out of that part. — 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

The most sublime of oddballs, Leonardo da Vinci — Norman Maclean

Far back in the impulses to find this story is a storyteller's belief that at times life takes on the shape of art and that the remembered remnants of these moments are largely what we come to mean by life. The short semihumours comedies we live, our long certain tragedies, and our springtime lyrics and limericks make up most of what we are. they become almost all of what we remember of ourselves. — Norman Maclean

Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on. — 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

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

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

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

Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding. — Norman Maclean

Perhaps we always wondered which of us was tougher, but, if boyhood questions aren't answered before a certain point in time, they can't ever be raised again. So we returned to being gracious to each other, as the wall — Norman Maclean

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched ... Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.
Even the anatomy of a river was laid bare. Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory. — Norman Maclean

They were still so young they hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy. — Norman Maclean

I had long ago learned, sometimes to my sorrow, that Scottish piety is accompanied by a complete foreknowledge of sin. That's what we mean by original sin - we don't have to do it to know about it. — Norman Maclean

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

Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. — Norman Maclean

Nobody," he said, "has put in a good day's fishing unless he leaves a couple of flies hanging on the bushes. You can't catch fish if you don't dare go where they are." "Let — Norman Maclean

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. — 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

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

It is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions. — Norman Maclean

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

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

I hope there are others also who don't mind trees. — 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

Although I have never pretended to be a great fisherman, it was always important to me that I was a fisherman and looked like one, especially when fishing with my brother. — Norman Maclean

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. — Norman Maclean

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

But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren't a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It's something like the gift all men wish for when they or young
or old
of being able to look through a woman's clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character. — Norman Maclean

Well, until man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod too far back, just as natural man always overswings with an ax or golf club and loses all his power somewhere in the air; only with a rod it's worse, because the fly often comes so far back it gets caught behind in a bush or rock. — Norman Maclean

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

I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself. — Norman Maclean

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. — Norman Maclean

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman. — 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.
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 those 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. — Norman Maclean

You can love completely without complete understanding."
"That I have known and preached." my father said. — Norman Maclean

To others in my family, the dog was something of a sacred object that had prolonged my father's life and helped to steady the rest of us. He was a fine dog, and after him, my father had no other dog. — 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

In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing
the fateful blowup. — Norman Maclean

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

Although divine bewilderment addresses its grief to the universe, it only cries out to it. It has to find its answer, if at all, in its own final act. It is not to be found among the answers God gave to Job in a whirlwind. — Norman Maclean

I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me. — Norman Maclean

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

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship. — 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

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. — 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

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

Somehow it's hard to quit with an odd number of fish, so I wanted one more for four, — Norman Maclean

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

...it is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace...(3) — Norman Maclean

On the Big Blackfoot River above the mouth of Belmont Creek the banks are fringed by large Ponderosa pines. In the slanting sun of late afternoon the shadows of great branches reached from across the river, and the trees took the river in their arms. The shadows continued up the bank, until they included us — 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

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