79 Quotes by Thomas McGuane

Napoleon said that if it weren’t for religion the poor would kill the rich. This may be all you needed to know about any human community. The churches were the real police stations, the real keepers of law and order.

I had just settled Grandma on her folding chair and popped open our box lunch when the corpse floated by.

The trouble is, you can’t properly present something you don’t believe in.

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

We both liked children; we just didn’t want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we’d leave that to others.

Quinn wanted to make her see that people didn’t live like this; but what was the use. No one was going to get her away from Bird Man out there.

I think he was just doing his best, getting along by going along with my mother, whose piety and evangelical fever had preoccupied her family since the last century. She knew no other world – God the Tyrant and supplicant humanity crawling on its belly to be forgiven for sins they never knew they’d committed. ‘It’s no sense defying the LORD,’ she told me. ‘He’s got all the coons up one tree.

I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either ethical or geographical. The Bible tells us to watch and listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.

I still don’t see why you think this is a matter of conviction when it’s just an extended bar fight.