Robert Traver Quotes

A lawyer caught in the toils of a murder case is like a man newly fallen in love: his involvement is total.

I swung around downtown and slowed down to miss a solitary drunk emerging blindly from the Tripoli bar and out upon the street in a sort of gangling somnambulistic trot, pursued on his way by the hollow roar of the juke box from the ghastly lit and empty bar. 'Sunstroke,' I murmured absently. 'Simply a crazed victim of the midnight sun.' As I parked my mud-spattered Coupe alongside the Miners' State Bank, across from my office over the dime store, I reflected that there were few more forlorn and lonely sounds than the midnight wail of a jukebox in a deserted small town, those raucous proclamations of joy and fun where, instead, there dwelt only fatigue and hangover and boredom. To me the wavering hoot of an owl sounded utterly gay by comparison.

I saw that I had forgotten how beautiful the drive to Thunder Bay was; the towering sighing groves of fragrant Norway pines, the broad expanses of clean white sand, the sea gulls, always the endlessly wheeling sea gulls; an occasional bald eagle seeming bent on soaring straight up to heaven; the intermittent craggy and pine-clad granite or sandstone hills, sometimes rising gauntly to the dignity of small mountains, then again, sudden stretches of sand or more majestic Norway pines -- and always, of course, the vast glittering heaving lake, the world's largest inland sea, as treacherous and deceitful as a spurned woman, either caressing or raging at the shore, more often turbulent than not, but today on its best company manners, presenting the falsely placid aspect of a mill pond.

Plot these days is anti-intellectual and verboten, the mark of the Philistine, the huckster with a pen. There mustn't be too much story and that should be fog-bound and shrouded in heavy symbolism, including the phallic, like a sort of covoluted charade. Symbolism now carries the day, it's the one true ladder of literary heaven.

I fish because I love to . . . because I love the environs where trout are found . . . because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip . . . and, finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant––and not nearly so much fun.