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

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.

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

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

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

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

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