Quotes by Norman Maclean

About Norman Maclean:

Norman Fitzroy Maclean was an American author and scholar noted for his books A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976) and Young Men and Fire (1992).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.

Norman Maclean

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

Norman Maclean

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 th...

Norman Maclean

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...

Norman Maclean

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

Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear

Norman Maclean

Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear

Norman Maclean

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 d...

Norman Maclean

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 go...

Norman Maclean

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

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

Norman Maclean

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 th...

Norman Maclean

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 screwup...

Norman Maclean

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

Norman Maclean

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 somethi...

Norman Maclean

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 f...

Norman Maclean

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

Norman Maclean

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameNorman Maclean
  • DescriptionFiction writer, angling writer, academic
  • BornDecember 23, 1902
  • DiedAugust 2, 1990
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Novelist; Journalist
  • WorksA River Runs Through It (novel); Young Men And Fire