After fifty years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth.

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

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.

I like young girls. Their stories are shorter.

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

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

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.

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

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

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