Thomas McGuane Quotes

• 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.

  Thomas McGuane

  Taken, Marine, Lakes

  Thomas McGuane (1999). “The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing”, Knopf

  185 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Fishing, Trout, Consuming

  Thomas McGuane (2014). “The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing”, p.13, Vintage

  56 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas McGuane

  Friendship, Dog, Mean

  53 Copy quote

• America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that's 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We're in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.

  Thomas McGuane

  Suicide, Running, Two

  54 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas McGuane

  Teaching, Sea, Fishing

  Thomas McGuane (2014). “The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing”, p.15, Vintage

  26 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Sea, Fishing, Rivers

  Thomas McGuane (2014). “The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing”, p.98, Vintage

  20 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Sports, Kings, Lakes

  27 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Chainsaw

  24 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Long, Tickets, Hazards

  Thomas McGuane (2015). “Panama”, p.46, Macmillan

  33 Copy quote

• I may be the wrong person for my life.

  Thomas McGuane

  May, Wrong Person, Persons

  22 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Lakes, Sea, Fishing

  20 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Men, Gone, Weak

  12 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Life, Nevermind

  Thomas McGuane (2013). “Gallatin Canyon”, p.31, Random House

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas McGuane

  Sports, Passion, Sea

  19 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Believe, Lakes, Sea

  Thomas McGuane (2014). “The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing”, p.69, Vintage

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas McGuane

  Spiritual, Distance, Views

  18 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Grandma, Lunch, Chairs

  Thomas McGuane (2015). “Crow Fair: Stories”, p.35, Vintage

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas McGuane

  Rivers, Essence, Way

  6 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Moving, Target, Fortune

  11 Copy quote

• Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.

  Thomas McGuane

  Giving, Montana, Freak

  Thomas McGuane (2010). “Driving on the Rim”, p.238, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas McGuane

  Past, Lakes, Sea

  Thomas McGuane (2014). “The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing”, p.237, Vintage

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Thomas McGuane

  Children, Couple, Hands

  Thomas McGuane (2015). “Crow Fair: Stories”, p.82, Vintage

  13 Copy quote

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

  Thomas McGuane

  Late, Harder, Grows

  Thomas McGuane (2012). “Nobody's Angel”, p.33, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• I like young girls. Their stories are shorter.

  Thomas McGuane

  Girl, I Like You, Stories

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Thomas McGuane

  Running, Fun, Mean

  Thomas McGuane (2014). “The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing”, p.6, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

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