Top 63 Quotes About Fly Fishing
#2. Fly tackle has improved considerably since 1676, when Charles Cotton advised anglers to 'fish fine and far off,' but no one has ever improved on that statement.
John Gierach
#3. Well, I love fishing. I wouldn't kill a fly myself but I've no hesitation in killing a fish. A lot of men are like that. No bother. Out you come. Thump. And that's not the only reason.
Norman MacCaig
#4. Something to think about: If you fish the wrong fly long and hard enough, it will sooner or later become the right fly.
John Gierach
#5. Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's reason to live! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can learn to be free! we can learn to fly!
Richard Bach
#6. For this form of fishing (with a wet fly), the rod is no longer a shooting machine but a receiving post, with super-sensitive antennae, capable of registering immediately the slightest reaction of the fish to the fly.
Charles Ritz
#7. The issue of imitation has always occupied fly fishers, and part of its endless attraction has been the imponderable uncertainty of how much it matters to the fish in the first place.
Paul Schullery
#8. I go to Alaska and fish salmon. I do some halibut fishing, lake fishing, trout fishing, fly fishing. I look quite good in waders. I love my waders. I don't think there is anything sexier than just standing in waders with a fly rod. I just love it.
Linda Hamilton
#9. Other CEOs were shown fly-fishing in Scottish rivers or piloting their own Learjets into Helsinki. Mr. Hosokawa was photographed at home in the leather chair he sat in when he listened, a Nansei EX-12 stereo system behind him.
Ann Patchett
#10. The great charm of fly-fishing is that we are always learning.
Theodore Gordon
#12. I was 35 years old and in a position to take a shot at whatever I wanted to try. The Air Force said I was too old to fly fighter jets. I thought about becoming a fishing boat captain, before deciding that acting seemed pretty cool.
Jerry Doyle
#13. You must feel comfortable with that fly rod in your hand before you spend time, money, and emotional capital on a fishing trip.
The Orvis Company
#14. He had never seen fly-fishing like this before. There were wet flies, and there were dry flies, but this fly augured into the water with a saw-toothed whine and dragged the fish out backwards.
Terry Pratchett
#15. If you've got short, stubby fingers and wear reading glasses, any relaxation you would normally derive from fly fishing is completely eliminated when you try to tie on a fly.
Jack Ohman
#16. I don't really know how to tie a fly until I've tied a hundred dozen of them.
John Gierach
#17. It is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions.
Norman Maclean
#18. 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
#19. The dream is everything in the sport of fishing. You dream with every cast of your fly that the shadowy form will finally rise to your fly. You dream as you drop off to sleep at night about the lunker that got loose just as you were about to net it.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#20. To paraphrase a deceased patriot, I regret that I have only one life to give to my fly-fishing.
John D. Voelker
#21. There's more B.S. in fly fishing than there is in a Kansas feedlot.
Lefty Kreh
#22. And for winter fly-fishing it is as useful as an almanac out of date.
Izaak Walton
#23. Had I a river I would gladly let all honest anglers that use the fly cast line in it, but, but where there is no protection, then nets, poison, dynamite, slaughter of fingerlings, and unholy baits devastate the fish, so that 'free fishing' spells no fishing at all.
Andrew Lang
#24. What a tourist terms a plague of insects, the fly fisher calls a great hatch.
Patrick F. McManus
#25. Fly fishing or any other sport fishing, is an end in itself and not a game or competition among fishermen ...
Ed Zern
#26. Fly fishing is not about catching the fish. It is about enjoying the water, the breeze, the fish swimming all around. If you catch one, good. If you don't ... that is even better. That mean you come out and get to try all over again.
Clare Vanderpool
#27. I remember the good evenings I have fished, even the ones that realised material hopes not by the fish that came to the fly, but by the colour and movement of the water and sky, by the sounds and scents and gentle stirrings that were all about me.
Roderick Haig-Brown
#28. Around the steel no tortur'd worm shall twine, No blood of living insect stain my line; Let me, less cruel, cast the feather'd hook, With pliant rod athwart the pebbled brook, Silent along the mazy margin stray, And with the fur-wrought fly delude the prey.
John Gay
#29. Yes, I actually have a portable fly-tying kit in my vest. I spent hours putting it all together, with a special emphasis on midge materials as well as enough fur and feathers to whip out a half dozen of virtually every conceivable dry pattern nature can throw at me. I have used it once, in 1993.
Jack Ohman
#30. There is no more graceful and healthful accomplishment for a lady than fly-fishing, and there is no reason why a lady should not in every respect, rival a gentleman in the gentle art.
William Cowper Prime
#31. Fly-fishing is a magic way to recapture the rapture of solitude without the pangs of loneliness.
John D. Voelker
#32. Fly-fishing for wild trout on quiet waters must be one of the toughest and craziest ways to catch fish ever invented by man, as well as among the most frustrating and humiliating.
John D. Voelker
#33. The fly angler who says they have never, ever fallen while wading , is either a pathogenic liar, or has never been fly-fishing.
Jimmy Moore
#34. One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing
Norman Maclean
#35. I was just wondering how long we were going to pretend like we annoyed each other before we started sleeping together.
Beck Anderson
#36. Whether I caught fish or not, just the thrill of rolling out that line and watching my fly turn over has been good enough for me. That and the hundreds of treasured memories I have of this wonderful sport.
Curt Gowdy
#37. Fly fishermen are born honest, but they get over it.
Ed Zern
#38. I fished a little while ago with a man, not in his first youth, who had wasted the flower of his life on business and golf and gardening and motoring and marriage, and had in this way postponed his initiation (to fly fishing) far too long.
Arthur Ransome
#39. People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.
Neil Kinnock
#41. Finally, Gunner spoke, his voice so fluid and moving, it could have come from the river itself. I once hear a poem about angling. It say when you send out your line, it is like you cast out your troubles to let the current carry them away. I keep casting.
Clare Vanderpool
#42. Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.
Charles Kuralt
#43. Spending more time with my fly firmly attached to the branches of trees and almost none of it attached to the lips of a trout.
Tom Sutcliffe
#44. But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in' proud to use the title. I won't touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.
Robert A. Heinlein
#45. He belonged to the new breed of male epicureans who viewed cooking as a competitive sport, and pursued it with the same avidity that others had for fly-fishing or golf, with the attendant fetishization of the associated gadgetry and equipment. He
Jay McInerney
#46. If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.
Tom Brokaw
#47. What I had mastered was fly-fishing Rule # 1: Remove all hooks from soft tissue under water, where near-freezing temperatures anesthetize exposed nerve endings and you can't hear your fellow anglers' hysterical laughter.
Jessica Maxwell
#48. To this day I would rather see a fish, creep up to him and watch his rise to my fly than catch half a dozen fish unseen until they take.
Roderick Haig-Brown
#49. About the only certainty, other than uncertainty, in fly fishing is that a fly won't catch fish if it stays in its box.
Arnold Gingrich
#50. Fly-fishing is the sport of the thinkers and the dreamers," Gunnar said. "It is the contemplative man's recreation.
Clare Vanderpool
#51. Fly-fishing is solitary, contemplative, misanthropic, scientific in some hands, poetic in others, and laced with conflicting aesthetic considerations. It's not even clear if catching fish is actually the point.
John Gierach
#52. It is well known that no person who regards his reputation will ever kill a trout with anything but a fly. It requires some training on the part of the trout to take to this method.
Charles Dudley Warner
#53. I imagine that no art has ever been learned from books. fly-fishing is no exception.
G. E. M. Skues
#54. Somebody might say that they always wanted to be a fly-fishing guide in Montana and maybe they'll never get to do that but just by the virtue of having said it out loud, I think there's some power in that.
John Lee Hancock
#55. The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.
Justin Cronin
#56. Fly fishing is the most beautiful way of trying to catch a fish; not the most efficient, just as ballet is the most beautiful way of moving the body between between two points, not the most direct. Fly fishing is to fishing as ballet is to walking.
Howell Raines
#57. For me, fishing and journalism touched the same places in my head. In comparison with that of poets, the fly fishers' and the journalists' experiences are probably pale flavors, but they carry nonetheless a hint of ambrosia.
Howell Raines
#58. Buying a fly rod in the average city store, that is, joining it up and safely waggling it a bit, is much like seeing a woman's arm protruding from a car window: all one can readily be sure of is that the window is open.
John D. Voelker
#59. Whether it's fly-fishing, taking your camper to the Everglades, or just traveling, everyone has got a little retirement dream.
Jean Chatzky
#60. But ah, to fish with a worm, and then not catch your fish! To fail with a fly is no disgrace: your art may have been impeccable, your patience faultless to the end. But the philosophy of worm-fishing is that of results, of having something tangible in your basket when the day's work is done.
Bliss Perry
#61. The doctor didn't want me to play golf anymore and was worried about me fly-fishing. Golf is something I enjoy, but fly-fishing is a different thing: That's religion. Hunting is religion for me. I didn't want to give those up.
Tom Brokaw
#62. O, sir, doubt not that Angling is an art; is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly?
Izaak Walton
#63. Time flies so fast after youth is past that we cannot accomplish one half the many things we have in mind or indeed one half our duties. The only safe and sensible plan is to make other things give way to the essentials, and the first of these is fly fishing.
Theodore Gordon