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.

Thomas McGuane

Categorized in : Two Running Suicide

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.

Thomas McGuane

marine taken lakes

Angling is extremely time consuming. That's sort of the whole point.

Thomas McGuane

consuming trout fishing

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.

Thomas McGuane

dog friendship mean

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

Thomas McGuane

kings lakes sports

The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.

Thomas McGuane

hazards tickets long

Early on I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included.

Thomas McGuane

fishing teaching sea

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

Thomas McGuane

chainsaw

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

Thomas McGuane

weak gone men

I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either ethical or geographical. The Bible tells us to watch and listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.

Thomas McGuane

passion sea sports

I may be the wrong person for my life.

Thomas McGuane

wrong-person persons may

Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.

Thomas McGuane

fishing sea lakes

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.

Thomas McGuane

distance spiritual views

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

Thomas McGuane

fishing sea rivers

It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.

Thomas McGuane

nevermind life

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

Thomas McGuane

chairs lunch grandma

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

Thomas McGuane

sea lakes believe

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.

Thomas McGuane

sea lakes past

We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.

Thomas McGuane

couple children hands

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

Thomas McGuane

target fortune moving

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.

Thomas McGuane

essence rivers way