Great Fisherman Quotes & Sayings

[What a great way to describe how a city takes its unique "shape"...beautiful turn-of-phrase by Kieran Shields(!)]:

"It was a city of slopes, curves, and dips carved by glaciers and now criss-crossed by a network of angled streets and blocks, unfettered by any sense of regularity and uniformity. Portland's maze of cobbled roads was the result of two and a half centuries of fisherman and merchants driven by immediate necessity and that economy of steps that occurs naturally in a place where winters often lasted five months out of the year. — Kieran Shields

Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman's bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation.
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume! — Chinua Achebe

Before 1975, if you knew the name Howard Sackler it was because he was the author behind the 1969 Broadway play The Great White Hope, which won Sackler the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle award as the year's Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A friend of film producer David Brown, Sackler accepted the offer to do a re-write on Jaws author Peter Benchley's script for the film version of his novel. Sackler's main contribution to the story was the back story that the shark fisherman, Quint, derived his hatred for sharks from having survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July of 1945 (in the film, Quint errantly states the date as "June the 29th, 1945"). — Louis R. Pisano

There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only one you. — Ernest Hemingway,

Just as a fisherman cannot catch fish unless his line is in the water, a wildlife photographer cannot shoot great wildlife images unless he or she is out there with camera in hand and the knowledge of what to do then the 'magnificent moment' occurs. — George H. Harrison

I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand. — Ernest Hemingway,

This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft. — Robin Hobb

I am almost certain fishermen posess a peculiar bend to their makeup. Fisherman are optimists, and the fish in the future is always preferable to the fish at hand. Even the best fishermen catch fish only a small percentage of the time, which means we persevere in a sport that features failure as its main ingredient. Truly great days, when the fish hammer the fly as soon as it lands on the water are rare. — Joseph Monninger

In this quiet, peaceful time of twilight there is, in this great circle of life, an awful lot of hunting and fishing and catching and killing and dying and eating going on all around me. As the old fisherman said, 'That's the way with life. Sometimes you eat well; sometimes you are well-eaten.' — Paul G. Quinnett

How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were - no, not a truer, for the other is false, but - a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch. — George MacDonald

And his Soul besought him to depart, but he would not, so great was his love. And the sea came nearer, and sought to cover him with its waves, and when he knew that the end was at hand he kissed with mad lips the cold lips of the Mermaid, and the heart that was within him brake. And as through the fullness of his love his heart did break, the Soul found an entrance and entered in, and was one with him even as before. And the sea covered the young Fisherman with its waves. — Oscar Wilde

Fishing in rainy conditions may make fisherman seem crazy to the great mass of unimaginative people, but then few fishermen care what they think — John Gierach

Salem"

In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's
asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
lashes the oily slick about your head,
beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft
dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,--
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees? — Robert Lowell

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

He'd was called first Cephas in Aramaic, then Petros, rock, in Greek. Eventually he became Peter and the Gospels proclaimed that Christ said, Upon this rock I shall build my church.'
The testimony was the first ancient account he'd ever read that made sense. No supernatural events or miraculous apparitions. No actions contrary to history or logic. No inconsistent details that cast doubt on credibility. Just the testimony by a simple fisherman of how he'd borne witness to a great man, one whose good works and kind words lived on after his death, enough to inspire him to continue the cause. — Steve Berry

I will sell thee my soul,' he answered: 'I pray thee buy it off me, for I am weary of it. Of what use is my soul to me? I cannot see it. I may not touch it. I do not know it.'
But the merchants mocked at him, and said, 'Of what use is a man's soul to us? It is not worth a clipped piece of silver. Sell us thy body for a slave, and we will clothe thee in sea-purple, and put a ring upon thy finger, and make thee the minion of the great Queen. But talk not of the soul, for to us it is nought, nor has it any value for our service.'
And the young Fisherman said to himself: 'How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.' And he passed out of the market-place, and went down to the shore of the sea, and began to ponder on what he should do. — Oscar Wilde

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