Top 53 Norman Maclean Quotes
#1. We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.
Norman Maclean
#2. 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
#3. The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.
Norman Maclean
#4. 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
#5. A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.
Norman Maclean
#6. One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing
Norman Maclean
#7. 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
#8. ...it is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace...(3)
Norman Maclean
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions.
Norman Maclean
#14. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
Norman Maclean
#15. 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
#17. The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.
Norman Maclean
#18. 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
#19. I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me.
Norman Maclean
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
Norman Maclean
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
Norman Maclean
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning
Norman Maclean
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Life every now and then becomes literature ... as if life had been made and not happened.
Norman Maclean
#36. Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.
Norman Maclean
#37. At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.
Norman Maclean
#38. 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
#39. What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was.
Norman Maclean
#40. It is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions.
Norman Maclean
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.
Norman Maclean
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. You can love completely without complete understanding."
"That I have known and preached." my father said.
Norman Maclean
#48. I hope there are others also who don't mind trees.
Norman Maclean
#49. Somehow it's hard to quit with an odd number of fish, so I wanted one more for four,
Norman Maclean
#50. Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on.
Norman Maclean
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. When exhausted and feeling sorry for yourself, at least change your socks.
Norman Maclean
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