Norman Maclean
Author
1902-12-23
Quotes by Norman Maclean
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Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.
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You can love completely without complete understanding.
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If you push me far enough, all I really know is that he was a fine fisherman.You know more than that, my father said. He was beautiful.
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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.
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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.
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At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
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Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.
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Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as our brother's keepers, possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.
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Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.
Read quote -
Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.
Read quote -
You can love completely without complete understanding.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.
Read quote -
If you push me far enough, all I really know is that he was a fine fisherman.You know more than that, my father said. He was beautiful.
Read quote -
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
Read quote -
Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as our brother's keepers, possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.
Read quote -
Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.
Read quote -
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. You can love completely without complete understanding.
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In my family, there was no clear division between religion and fly-fishing.
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