32 Quotes by John Gierach

Trout are among those creatures who are one hell of a lot prettier than they need to be. They can get you to wondering about the hidden workings of reality.

Successful trout fishing isn’t a matter of brute force or even persistence, but something more like infiltration.

I don’t really know how to tie a fly until I’ve tied a hundred dozen of them.

And never fall into that statistical macho trap that’s so prevalent in fly-fishing these days. If you keep score, you can be beaten, but if you refuse to compete you can leave the impression that you have long since risen above that kind of crap. When someone says to you, “I caught forty-eight trout and ten of them were twenty inches or better. How’d you do?” say, “Yeah, we got some. Couple nice ones, too.

Luckily, though, there are still a few guys around who will look you straight in the eye and say, eloquently and to the point, ‘It’s been too goddamned hot for too long and the river has gone off.’