The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: 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.

Sunrise, Live, Understanding

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.

intimidation, love, universe

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

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

mystery, survive, universe, volunteer

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.

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.

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.

fire, renewal, revival

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.

At sunrise, everything is luminous but not clear

clarity, clear, light, luminous, sun, sunrise

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.

life, literature, purpose

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.

flood, river, time, water, words

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.

american-landscape, geology, idaho, landscape, mountains, nature