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
Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, a...
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.
For all of us, though, it is much easier to read the waters of tragedy. (64)
They were still so young they hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.
The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.
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...
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.
I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched... Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river...
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.
It is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions.
The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.
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 fis...
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.
Old Rawhide woke up and handed Paul the bottle of 3-7-77. Have a snort, she said. Paul took her hand and moved it around to where she was offering the drink to Neal. As I said, for several reasons, in...
It is those that we live with and love and should know who elude us.
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.
As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling fr...
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.
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.