No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise.
My theory is that there is no word that you can say or noise that you can make with your mouth that is so horrible that it will send you to burn forever in that lake of fire! It's not gonna happen.
You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library. She pointed to the shelf opposite. Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.
Flyfishing, which has a vaguely mystical aura, is a lot like work. I'm a frenetic flyfisherman. I wade up and down streams, looking for good spots, usually falling and breaking some piece of equipment. Or I stand still and work myself into a frenzy about what fly I should use. I love fishing, but it has never given me a moments peace.
Accurately recalling an entire day of fishing is like trying to push smoke back down a chimney, so you settle on these specific moments.
The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube.
. . . buying a fly rod in the average city store, that is, joining it up and safely waggling it a bit, is much like seeing a woman's arm protruding from a car window: all one can readily be sure of is that the window is open.
It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys.
I’m not much of a fly tier. I can do it—my friend calls it 'ham and eggs tying'—and I tie some cool flies that I can’t buy in a fly shop, but other than that, I would no more sit down and tie a dozen hopper patterns than I would do something absolutely insane, like build a rod.
A fisherman is always hopeful -- nearly always more hopeful than he has any right to be.
Early on I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included.
Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.
The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.
I'm going to gut you like a fish.
Next to prayer, Fishing is the most personal relationship of man.
Your culture is your limit; if you can't go beyond it, you will remain as a frog of your little lake!
The proof given by Wright, that non-adaptive differentiation will occur in small populations owing to "drift," or the chance fixation of some new mutation or recombination, is one of the most important results of mathematical analysis applied to the facts of neo-mendelism. It gives accident as well as adaptation a place in evolution, and at one stroke explains many facts which puzzled earlier selectionists, notably the much greater degree of divergence shown by island than mainland forms, by forms in isolated lakes than in continuous river-systems.
We have nearly complete misunderstanding between people of different faiths in Lake Wobegon, and that's probably one reason why we get along so very well. It's when you are trying to convince another person to think the same way that you do that there is friction and trouble between people. But when you feel that the other person is dumber than dirt, too dumb for words - why waste your breath - you get along pretty well. There's no bond between people that's quite so strong as when people each feel slightly superior towards the other one.
It is well known that no person who regards his reputation will ever kill a trout with anything but a fly. It requires some training on the part of the trout to take to this method.
You can't say enough about fishing. Though the sport of kings, it's just what the deadbeat ordered.