In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.
Poets talk about “spots of time”, but it is really the 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.
The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.
A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.
A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.
It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
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.
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.
How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions.
The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.
At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.
I am haunted by waters.
Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me.
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.
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.
Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.
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.
The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.