Thomas McGuane Quotes

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.

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

After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time they had gone together.

I think he was just doing his best, getting along by going along with my mother, whose piety and evangelical fever had preoccupied her family since the last century. She knew no other world - God the Tyrant and supplicant humanity crawling on its belly to be forgiven for sins they never knew they'd committed. 'It's no sense defying the LORD,' she told me. 'He's got all the coons up one tree.

We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God's Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody's refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert

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

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

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

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.

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.

But it was as if a tiny animal living in the corner of my mind, smaller than a mouse, smaller than an ant, and unobtrusive even considering its size, was saying, 'Bullshit.

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

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

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.

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.

She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you.

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics.

Quinn wanted to make her see that people didn't live like this; but what was the use. No one was going to get her away from Bird Man out there.

Napoleon said that if it weren't for religion the poor would kill the rich. This may be all you needed to know about any human community. The churches were the real police stations, the real keepers of law and order.

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

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

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

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.

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

That food was so bad I can't wait for it to become a turd and leave me.

At the battle of Waterloo, men formed squares into which the wounded were brought for medical care. At the height of the battle, in the madness of the cannonading and death, the riderless horses of the cavalry, the caisson horses of the slaughtered gun crews attempted to penetrate the squares to be saved by the humans. And in the First World War, men subjected to unparalleled mayhem were stricken more by the plight of the horses than anything else. There is a special grief for the innocent caught up in mankind's murderous follies.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

The essence of sport is courage.

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.