Thomas McGuane Quotes

Early on I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

An undisturbed river is as perfect as we will ever know, every refractive slide of cold water a glimpse of eternity.

The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.

Something had gone amiss with men, and the weak ones were dangerous.

I like young girls. Their stories are shorter.

Generally, we are united in the belief that all rod design has been progressive and that the ideas about fly rods in the past were so bad as to make it amazing that people were able to fish at all.

It's funny, but... you're sort of a moving target for fortune, and you never know when it will befall you.

We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity's demand upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a river-keeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.

Angling is extremely time consuming. That's sort of the whole point.

Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.

My life was the best omelette you could make with a chainsaw

You can't say enough about fishing. Though the sport of kings, it's just what the deadbeat ordered.

The trouble is, you can't properly present something you don't believe in.

We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives. Time does not seem to be of the essence and somewhere in the system is what they are looking for.

In the future, I mean to be a fine streamside entomologist. I'm going to start on that when I am much too old to do any of the two thousand things I can think of that are more fun than screening insects in cold running water

I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs. To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness.

The essence of sport is courage.

I had just settled Grandma on her folding chair and popped open our box lunch when the corpse floated by.

To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it.

I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either ethical or geographical. The Bible tells us to watch and listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.

It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.

The mountains paralleled the valley and the snowy peaks were extending with fall to the valley floor.

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.