Norman Maclean Quotes

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.

We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

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

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

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.

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.

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.

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

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.

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