“The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
“Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
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 those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
“So it is that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
“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's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
“The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
“On the Big Blackfoot River above the mouth of Belmont Creek the banks are fringed by large Ponderosa pines. In the slanting sun of late afternoon the shadows of great branches reached from across the river, and the trees took the river in their arms. The shadows continued up the bank, until they included us”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
“At sunrise, everything is luminous but not clear”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
“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 those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
“That's how you know when you have thought too much-- when you become a dialogue between You'll probably lose and You're sure to lose.”
― Norman Maclean, quote from A River Runs Through It
Norman Maclean
Born place: in Clarinda, Iowa, The United States
Born date January 23, 1902
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“There’s a planet called Echo. It doesn’t exist. It’s like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and the deck empty. It comes on the radar, you fly towards it, there’s nothing there. Our crew were outside, repairing the craft, and we saw it moving at speed right at us. It passed straight through the ship and through our bodies, and the strange thing that happened was the bleach. It bleached our clothes and hair, and men that had black beards had white. Then it was gone, echoing in another part of the starry sky, always, ‘here’ and ‘here’ and ‘here’, but nowhere. Some call it Hope.”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs
“The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. . . . Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. . . . Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
“Sometimes we do not hear the Whisperer even at her loudest because she speaks in our own voice, the one we most often discount.”
― Diane Duane, quote from The Book of Night with Moon
“Let the earth and the sea each have its own.”
― Joseph Conrad, quote from The Nigger of the Narcissus
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Mile HighBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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