" Even so, in a typical week of our childhood Paul and I probably recieved as many hours of instruction in fly fishing as we did in all other spiritual matters " P.2
"My brother's wet clothes made it easy to see his strength. Most great casters I have known were big men over six feet, the added height certainly making it easier to get more line in the air in a bigger arc. My brother was only five ten, but he had fished so many years that his body had become partly shaped by his casting." p.21
"Black Jack's was a freight car taken off its wheels and set on gravel at the other end of the bridge crossing the Little Prickly Pear. On the side of the box was the sign of the Great Northern Railroad, a mountain goat gazing thgough a white beard on a world painted red. This is the only goat that ever saw the bottom of his world constantly occupied by a bottle of bar whiskey labeled '3-7-77,' the number of vigilantes pinned on the road agents they hanged in order to represent probably the dimensions of a grave." P.30
"Everything seemed electrically charged but electrically unconnected. Electrical sparks appeared here and there on the river. A fish jumped so far downstream that is seemed outside the man's electrical field, but, when the fish had jumped, the man had leaned back on the rod and it was then that the fish had toppled back into the water not guided in its reentry by itself." P.98