Thomas McGuane quotes:

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.

In the future, I mean to be a fine streamside entomologist. I'm going to start on that when I am much too old to do any of the two thousand things I can think of that are more fun than screening insects in cold running water

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I like young girls. Their stories are shorter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

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

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

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

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

The essence of sport is courage.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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