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

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

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.

Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

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.

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