At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.
Interpretation
Life's experiences are more fluid and interconnected than fixed narratives.
Norman Maclean's quote suggests that life is not a straightforward narrative, like a book, but rather more complex and dynamic, akin to a river that flows and changes. It implies that our experiences are interconnected and continuously evolving, highlighting the unpredictable and organic nature of human existence.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might say, 'As Norman Maclean wisely noted, stories of life are often more like rivers than books.'
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 the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.
Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the 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.
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 for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. You can love completely without complete understanding.
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 it is only a floating ash.
Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.
It is impossible for us, who live in the latter ages of the world, to make observations in criticism, morality, or in any art or science, which have not been touched upon by others. We have little else left us but to represent the common sense of mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny.
Every thoughtful, well-meaning and conscientious human being_x000D_ should assume in time of peace,_x000D_ the solemn and unconditional obligation_x000D_ not to participate in any war, for any reason_x000D_ or to lend support of any kind, whether direct or indirect.
Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts. But let this happen in such a way that no one become aware of it; or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand to be produced immediately.
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