Norman Maclean Quotes

Life writes the best stories.

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys.

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

You don't just have a story - you're a story in the making, and you never know what the next chapter's going to be. That's what makes it exciting.

I've learned from experience you just never know what happens in life.

I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.

I always liken life to a book where you turn the pages one at a time.

We are surrounded by story.

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?

I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK. We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know; it was the best.

Things are always different from what they might be.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Sometimes it is impossible to stop the river of life.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

No one has ever stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

We don't have to look for what the next thing will be. If experience is any judge, it'll come flowing toward us like a river.

I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

My wife, Amanda, is terribly good at warping reality. She is like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet, and you find yourself living in her universe, doing things that are completely unexpected or unimaginable for you, but you blink and you're up on a stage singing, or wearing a peculiar wig, or writing a book filled with feelings and emotion, or doing something equally as unlikely.

Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story.