We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

All good things come 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. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.

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 fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

...life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.