Top 35 Thomas McGuane Quotes
#1. After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time they had gone together.
Thomas McGuane
#2. Angling is extremely time consuming. That's sort of the whole point.
Thomas McGuane
#3. Quinn wanted to make her see that people didn't live like this; but what was the use. No one was going to get her away from Bird Man out there.
Thomas McGuane
#4. But it was as if a tiny animal living in the corner of my mind, smaller than a mouse, smaller than an ant, and unobtrusive even considering its size, was saying, 'Bullshit.
Thomas McGuane
#5. The trouble is, you can't properly present something you don't believe in.
Thomas McGuane
#6. 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
#7. She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you.
Thomas McGuane
#8. Generally, we are united in the belief that all rod design has been progressive and that the ideas about fly rods in the past were so bad as to make it amazing that people were able to fish at all.
Thomas McGuane
#9. Napoleon said that if it weren't for religion the poor would kill the rich. This may be all you needed to know about any human community. The churches were the real police stations, the real keepers of law and order.
Thomas McGuane
#10. 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
#11. The mountains paralleled the valley and the snowy peaks were extending with fall to the valley floor.
Thomas McGuane
#12. They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics.
Thomas McGuane
#14. That food was so bad I can't wait for it to become a turd and leave me.
Thomas McGuane
#15. It's funny, but ... you're sort of a moving target for fortune, and you never know when it will befall you.
Thomas McGuane
#16. After fifty years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth.
Thomas McGuane
#17. You can't say enough about fishing. Though the sport of kings, it's just what the deadbeat ordered.
Thomas McGuane
#18. 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
#19. I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs. To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness.
Thomas McGuane
#21. Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.
Thomas McGuane
#22. I had just settled Grandma on her folding chair and popped open our box lunch when the corpse floated by.
Thomas McGuane
#23. 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
#24. Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.
Thomas McGuane
#25. 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
#26. Something had gone amiss with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.
Thomas McGuane
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. An undisturbed river is as perfect as we will ever know, every refractive slide of cold water a glimpse of eternity.
Thomas McGuane
#31. I considered the wonder of the things that befell me, convinced that my life was the best omelet you could make with a chainsaw.
Panama
Thomas McGuane
#32. Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.
Thomas McGuane
#33. My life was the best omelette you could make with a chainsaw
Thomas McGuane
#34. 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
#35. It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.
Thomas McGuane
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