The collection / 18 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.

Norman Maclean / quote

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02Undated

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.

Norman Maclean / quote

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03Undated

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

Norman Maclean / quote

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04Undated

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.

Norman Maclean / quote

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05Undated

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 the 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

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06Undated

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.

Norman Maclean / quote

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07Undated

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.

Norman Maclean / quote

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08Undated

You can love completely without complete understanding.

Norman Maclean / quote

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09Undated

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.

Norman Maclean / quote

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10Undated

A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.

Norman Maclean / quote

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11Undated

... you can love completely without complete understanding.""That I have known and preached." my father said.

Norman Maclean / quote

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12Undated

It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling.

Norman Maclean / quote

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13Undated

But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren't a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It's something like the gift all men wish for when they or young-- or old-- of being able to look through a woman's clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character.

Norman Maclean / quote

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14Undated

For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us - excitedly finding we were wrong and excitedly waiting for tomorrow to come so we can start over.

Norman Maclean / quote

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15Undated

When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again. So what I saw because of what I knew was a kind of death with the marvellous promise of less than a three-day resurrection.

Norman Maclean / quote

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16Undated

In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing--the fateful blowup.

Norman Maclean / quote

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17Undated

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.

Norman Maclean / quote

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18Undated

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.

Norman Maclean / quote

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