Roderick Langmere Haig-Brown (February 21, 1908 – October 9, 1976) was a Canadian writer and conservationist.
. . . To this day I would rather see a fish, creep up to him and watch his rise to my fly than catch half a dozen fish unseen until they take.
I still don't know why I fish or why other men fish, except that we like it and it makes us think and feel.
Wherever we go in the world we find other men speaking the same language, planning the same plans, dreaming the same dreams. And one of the big four - brownie, or brookie, cutthroat or rainbow - is the cause of it all
I remember the good evenings I have fished, even the ones that realised material hopes not by the fish that came to the fly, but by the colour and movement of the water and sky, by the sounds and scents and gentle stirrings that were all about me.
A man should think when he fishing of all manner and shape of things, flowing as easily through the mind as the light stream among the rocks
It is quite easy to debase the sport, change its values, dilute its ethics and destroy its traditional associations with quietness, relaxation and the opportunity to think. Angling is not a competitive sport. The fisherman'- s only real competition is with his quarry and his only real challenge is the challenge to himself. Nothing can add to this, but the blight of interhuman competition can certainly detract from it.
I have two hopes for the future. The first and lesser one is that game commissions will one day have sense enough to set limits that measurably reflect the sport safely available. The second and deeply urgent one is that we shall grow a race of sportsmen no one of whom will ever consider it a matter of pride to have killed a limit.
I have been, all my life, what is known as a conservationist. It seems clear beyond possibility of argument that any given generation of men can have only a lease, not ownership, of the earth; and one essential term of the lease is that the earth be handed down on to the next generation with unimpaired potentialities. This is the conservationist's concern.
Anglers. . . exaggerate grossly and make gentle and inoffensive creatures sound like wounded buffalo and man-eating tigers.
I have fished through fishless days that I remember happily without regret.
Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers.
A river is water is its loveliest form; rivers have life and sound and movement and infinity of variation, rivers are veins of the earth through which the lifeblood returns to the heart
I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water. . . has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.
Our tradition is that of the first man who sneaked away to the creek when the tribe did not really need fish.
There will be days when the fishing is better than one's most optimistic forecast, others when it is far worse. Either is a gain over just staying home.
A fisherman is always hopeful -- nearly always more hopeful than he has any right to be.