One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if….

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them..

I am haunted by waters..

If our father had had his way, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him..

The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience..

Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly..

A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help..

When exhausted and feeling sorry for yourself, at least change your socks..

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what….

I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me..

As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God'….

Probably most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died...,those who loved them forever questioning "this ….

How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions..

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship..

At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books..

...life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened..

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself..

Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyon….

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each o….

As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude fo….

One great thing about fly fishing is that after a while nothing exists of the world but thoughts about fly fishing.