As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.

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

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.

All good things come by grace, and grace comes by art, and art does not come easy.

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

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

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.