79 Quotes by Thomas McGuane

Something had gone amiss with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.

Angling is extremely time consuming. That’s sort of the whole point.

Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.

The mountains paralleled the valley and the snowy peaks were extending with fall to the valley floor.

Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives. Time does not seem to be of the essence and somewhere in the system is what they are looking for.

In the future, I mean to be a fine streamside entomologist. I’m going to start on that when I am much too old to do any of the two thousand things I can think of that are more fun than screening insects in cold running water.

After fifty years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody’s teeth.

We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God’s Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody’s refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert.

Generally, we are united in the belief that all rod design has been progressive and that the ideas about fly rods in the past were so bad as to make it amazing that people were able to fish at all.