Thomas McGuane Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I may be the wrong person for my life.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I like young girls. Their stories are shorter.

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.

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

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

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.

The essence of sport is courage.

I like to write about the solitary things people do. Humans seem to function best when they're alone.

Marriage is anti-romantic - husband and wife are terms like 'turkey' and 'goose.' Worse, they denote ownership.

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