If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.
You can love completely without complete understanding.
In 1949 the Smokejumpers were still so young that they referred affectionately to all fires they jumped on as ten o’clock fires, as if they already had them under control before they jumped. They were...
I am haunted by waters.
All there is to thinking, he said, is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.
He himself has thinned out to the vanishing point of being only decisions once made that he can't do anything about ever after.
After I caught these two, I quit. They made ten, and the last three were the finest fish I ever caught. They weren't the biggest or most spectacular fish I ever caught, but they were three fish I caug...
Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as our brother's keepers, posse...
It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
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...
It is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace...(3)
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.
Far back in the impulses to find this story is a storyteller's belief that at times life takes on the shape of art and that the remembered remnants of these moments are largely what we come to mean by...
You like to tell true stories, don't you?' he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make...
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where...
Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear
Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on.
Indirectly, though, he was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I fe...
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...
On the Big Blackfoot River above the mouth of Belmont Creek the banks are fringed by large Ponderosa pines. In the slanting sun of late afternoon the shadows of great branches reached from across the...