Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
6 quotes
"Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go."
"I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened."
"If you push me far enough, all I really know is that he was a fine fisherman.""You know more than that," my father said. "He was beautiful."
"You can love completely without complete understanding."
"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."
"I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself."