The Sports Den's Fishing Quotations
The two best times to fish is when it's rainin' and when it ain't.
- Patrick F. McManus
To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Bass Fishermen vs Trout Fishermen
"Bass fishermen watch Monday night football, drink beer, drive pickup trucks and prefer noisy women with big breasts. Trout fishermen watch MacNeil-Lehrer, drink white wine, drive foreign cars with passenger-side air bags and hardly think about women at all. This last characteristic may have something to do with the fact that trout fishermen spend most of the time immersed up to the thighs in ice-cold water."
- New Yorker Magazine, June 13, 1994
Flyfishing is like sex, everyone thinks there is more than there is, and that everyone is getting more than their share.
- Henry Kanemoto, on Flyfish@ 1996
There are trout in my river whose attitudes,
Are quite of the blackest ingratitude;
Though I offer them duns,
Most superior ones,
They maintain a persistent Black Gnatitude.
- Anonymous
Enjoy thy stream oh, harmless fish,
And when an angler for his dish,
Through gluttony's vile sin,
Attempts--a wretch--to pull thee out
God give thee strength, oh, gentle trout,
To pull the rascal in.
- Peter Pindar
Testament of a Fisherman
I fish because I love to; because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly; because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape; because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion; because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience; because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip; because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters; because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness; because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there; because maybe one day I will catch a mermaid; and, finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant - and not nearly so much fun.
- Robert Traver, 1964 (Judge John Voelker, 1903-1993)
Fly-fishing is the most fun you can have standing up.
- Arnold Gingrich, 1969
To him, all good things -- trout as well as eternal salvation-- come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.
- Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, 1976
Some go to church and think about fishing, others go fishing and think about God.
- Tony Blake, on Flyfishing
"Although I know that it is heresy to suggest such an idea in the midst of an age of progress, it may be that ultimate truth lies in the spiritual attitude of the southerners who are always going fishing. A person who has achieved an immunity from the everlasting inner demand that he improve upon his earthly position must possess an unusual degree of cosmic equilibrium. He must have learned in some way that composure of the human spirit is all that actually matters. He has attained, without conscious effort, the serenity for which all men strive."
--Clarence Cason (1898-1935) (Submitted by BJ Hutto)
