The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.

At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.

One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing

We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

Many of us would probably be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

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.