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b5fc1a6
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Poets talk about "spots of time," but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone."
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Norman Maclean |
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35db359
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At sunrise, everything is luminous but not clear
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light
clear
luminous
sun
sunrise
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Norman Maclean |
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1b0bc5f
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time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning
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Norman Maclean |
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808de79
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Indirectly, though, he was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. "You like to tell true stories, don't you?" he asked, and I answered, "Yes, I like to tell stories that are true." Then he asked, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you ma..
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Norman Maclean |
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5494dca
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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 those 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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Norman Maclean |
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3c84e3f
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Help," he said, "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. "So it is," he said, using an old homiletic transition, "that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-suppl..
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Norman Maclean |
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2eb4e22
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You can love completely without complete understanding.
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love
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Norman MacLean |
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ecd5724
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It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.
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love
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Norman Maclean |
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07f2d39
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Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
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Norman Maclean |
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4edf46c
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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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love
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Norman Maclean |
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fafb952
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In 1949 the Smokejumpers were still so young that they referred affectionately to all fires they jumped on as "ten o'clock fires," as if they already had them under control before they jumped. They were still so young they hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy."
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Norman Maclean |
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407309a
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My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things--trout as well as eternal salvation--come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.
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Norman Maclean |
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84e5408
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In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing--the fateful blowup.
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Norman Maclean |
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6a8e63d
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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 brothers' keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting of instincts. It will not let us go."
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Norman Maclean |
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57dc2ec
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I hope there are others also who don't mind trees.
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Norman Maclean |
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cece941
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Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear
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inspiration
sunrise
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Norman Maclean |
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b3a3292
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If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.
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Norman Maclean |
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365f67c
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It is those that we live with and love and should know who elude us.
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Norman Maclean |
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9841209
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Nobody," he said, "has put in a good day's fishing unless he leaves a couple of flies hanging on the bushes. You can't catch fish if you don't dare go where they are." "Let"
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Norman Maclean |
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7bbf37d
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I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself.
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help
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Norman Maclean |
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bcc9cce
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All there is to thinking," he said, "is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible."
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Norman Maclean |
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c0f919b
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Far back in the impulses to find this story is a storyteller's belief that at times life takes on the shape of art and that the remembered remnants of these moments are largely what we come to mean by life. The short semihumours comedies we live, our long certain tragedies, and our springtime lyrics and limericks make up most of what we are. they become almost all of what we remember of ourselves.
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Norman Maclean |
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4805d9d
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Then he asked, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? "Only then will you understand what happened and why. "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us." Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them."
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Norman Maclean |
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383d1f0
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Well, until man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod too far back, just as natural man always overswings with an ax or golf club and loses all his power somewhere in the air; only with a rod it's worse, because the fly often comes so far back it gets caught behind in a bush or rock.
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Norman Maclean |
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701471a
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Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart--I don't know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.
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Norman Maclean |
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2defb25
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Although divine bewilderment addresses its grief to the universe, it only cries out to it. It has to find its answer, if at all, in its own final act. It is not to be found among the answers God gave to Job in a whirlwind.
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Norman Maclean |
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ecee3cc
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Somehow it's hard to quit with an odd number of fish, so I wanted one more for four,
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Norman Maclean |
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3d8a57a
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it is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace...(3)
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Norman Maclean |
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df6e8cf
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I had long ago learned, sometimes to my sorrow, that Scottish piety is accompanied by a complete foreknowledge of sin. That's what we mean by original sin--we don't have to do it to know about it.
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Norman Maclean |
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c6b6621
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I am haunted by waters.
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Norman Maclean |
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43bcf54
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One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing. It is also interesting that thoughts about fishing are often carried on in dialogue form where Hope and Fear--or, many times, two Fears--try to outweigh each other. One
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Norman Maclean |
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a00131e
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In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.
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Norman Maclean |
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0c2fa91
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That's how you know when you have thought too much-- when you become a dialogue between You'll probably lose and You're sure to lose.
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Norman Maclean |
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75a6079
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When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a whole that is different from the sum of its parts.
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Norman Maclean |
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a3eaf0a
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For all of us, though, it is much easier to read the waters of tragedy. (64)
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Norman Maclean |
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ba35507
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Although I have never pretended to be a great fisherman, it was always important to me that I was a fisherman and looked like one, especially when fishing with my brother.
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Norman Maclean |
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aff3a64
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Old Rawhide woke up and handed Paul the bottle of 3-7-77. "Have a snort," she said. Paul took her hand and moved it around to where she was offering the drink to Neal. As I said, for several reasons, including our father, Paul and I did not drink when we fished. Afterwards, yes, in fact, as soon as our wet clothes were off and we could stand on them instead of the pine needles one of us would reach for the glove compartment in the car where..
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Norman Maclean |
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db168b9
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Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on.
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Norman Maclean |
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aadbebe
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Perhaps we always wondered which of us was tougher, but, if boyhood questions aren't answered before a certain point in time, they can't ever be raised again. So we returned to being gracious to each other, as the wall
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Norman Maclean |
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01a40c8
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Sometimes all you have left to win with is the knowledge of why you're taking the beating and the realization that nobody else is going to save you from it.
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Norman Maclean |
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c0729ef
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He himself has thinned out to the vanishing point of being only decisions once made that he can't do anything about ever after.
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Norman Maclean |
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e249b16
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After I caught these two, I quit. They made ten, and the last three were the finest fish I ever caught. They weren't the biggest or most spectacular fish I ever caught, but they were three fish I caught because my brother waded across the river to give me the fly that would catch them and because they were the last fish I ever caught fishing with him. After
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Norman Maclean |
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97112e6
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The brain gives up a lot less easily than the body.
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Norman Maclean |