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...
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.
Then he asked, After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live...
Sometimes all you have left to win with is the knowledge of why you're taking the beating and the realization that nobody else is going to save you from it.
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
If he comes back, she nodded. I thought I saw tears in her eyes but I was mistaken. In all my life, I was never to see her cry. And also he was never to come back. Without interrupting each other, we...
Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true w...
As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the eart...
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.
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.
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...
One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing. It is also interesting that thoughts about fishing are often carried on in dialogue...
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherm...
Help, he said, is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. So it is, he said, using an old homiletic transition, that we can seldom help anybody. Either...
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless rain...
What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was.
To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy
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....
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.
Life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.