fishing Quotes

“It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.”

“I asked, “Do you think you should help him?” “Yes,” he said, “I thought we were going to.” “How?” I asked. “By taking him fishing with us.” “I’ve just told you,” I said, “he doesn’t like to fish.” “Maybe so,” my brother replied. “But maybe what he likes is somebody trying to help him.”

“Even the anatomy of a river was laid bare. Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory.”

“Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart—I don’t know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. 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.”

“On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”

“The cast is so soft and slow that it can be followed like an ash settling from a fireplace chimney. One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.”

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

“Poets talk about “spots of time,” but it is really 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.”

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”

“We’re at the creek catching fish with a holey net. Understandably, this may take some time. Come join us if you enjoy frustration.”

″‘If you don’t want people to look at you,’ Park had thought at the time, ‘don’t wear fishing lures in your hair.‘”

What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

Just then the stern line came taut under his foot, where he had kept the loop of the line, and he dropped his oars and felt the weight of the small tuna’s shivering pull as he held the line firm and commenced to haul it in. The shivering increased as he pulled in and he could see the blue back of the fish in the water and the gold of his sides before he swung him over the side and into the boat. He lay in the stern in the sun, compact and bullet shaped, his big, unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out against the planking of the boat with the quick shivering strokes of his neat, fast-moving tail. The old man hit him on the head for kindness and kicked him, his body still shuddering, under the shade of the stern.

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

Always it was to be called a rod. If someone called it a pole, my father looked at him as a sergeant in the United States Marines would look at a recruit who had just called a rifle a gun.

Until a man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod too far back, just as natural man always overswings with an ax or golf club and loses all his power somewhere in the air.

When [bait fishermen] come back home they don’t even kiss their mothers on the front porch before they’re in the back garden with a red Hills Bros. coffee can digging for angleworms.

“I had a dream about you. We were fishing in the Utah desert. You caught a dinosaur, but due to Federal regulations, we had to release the bones so Ted Kennedy could drive back to the cemetery, drunk.
”

“I caught more than you did. I caught you!”

″ ‘What a mercy that was not a pike!’ said Mr. Jeremy Fisher. ‘I have lost my rod and basket; but it does not much matter, for I am sure I should never have dared to go fishing again!’ ”

“Bad work and not many knowing it; quiet as water under the ground. You be careful, young mortal sir, as there’s more than one kind of angling and you could be sniggled in a flash! There’s lures and lures. That’s my message!”

“The Great Storm-Cat is stirring, thought Mowzer as she watched at her window. The wind whined like a wild thing about the high headlands. It came hunting the fishing boats in their hidden harbours. When the Great Storm-Cat is howling, thought Mowzer, it is best to stay snug indoors by a friendly fire. “

“And so it was that he was taken off guard as the little boat made its bid for freedom. Soothed by the sweetness of Mowzer’s serenade, the Great Storm-Cat paused in his prowling and pulled back his giant cat’s paw for a mere moment. Swiftly the little boat passed through the Mousehole and out into the open sea. Then the Great Storm-Cat played with them as a cat plays with a mouse. He would let them loose for a little as they fought their way towards the fishing grounds. Then down would come his giant cat’s paw in a flurry of foam and water. But he did not yet strike to sink them, for that would have spoiled his sport.”

“ ‘Mowzer, my handsome,’ he said, for he was a courteous and well-spoken man, ‘Mowzer, my handsome, it will soon be Christmas, and no man can stand by at Christmas and see the children starve. Someone must go fishing come what may, and I think it must be me. It cannot be the young men, for they have wives and children and mothers to weep for them if they do not return. But my wife and parents are dead long since and my children are grown and gone.’ “

“All day they fished in a seething sea. The waves were so high and the clouds were so low that they soon lost sight of the shore. And all the time the Great Storm-Cat played with the little boat, striking it and then losing it, but never quite sinking it. And whenever his claws grew to sharp, Mowzer would sing to him to soften the edge of his anger.”

“Grandpa kept some of the fish they caught in a net in the water. Every evening Stina pulled it out of the water and chose a fish for dinner. It was always delicious.”

“After breakfast, they went out in Grandpa’s boat to check the nets. Sometimes they were full of fish. Sometimes there was nothing but a bit of seaweed.”

“There was a Young Lady of Wales, Who caught a large Fish without scales; When she lifted her hook, she exclaimed, ‘Only look!’ That ecstatic Young Lady of Wales.”

“Closer and closer swooped the fishing birds near Ping. Now Ping could see shining rings around their necks, rings of metal made so tight the birds could never swallow the big fish they were catching. ”