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

Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.

I am haunted by waters.

We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

If our father had had his way, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.