Norman MacCaig Quotes

I don't fish but had always wanted to after doing it as a kid.

I have known a very good, fisher angle diligently four or six hours for a river carp, and not have a bite.

For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.

Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting.

There's no taking trout with dry breeches.

An ice-fishing shanty is basically a tin outhouse on a frozen lake, except that in an outhouse, the hole has a purpose. In ice fishing, the hole is what you stare at for hours, hoping that at some point you'll break the monotony by falling in.

I've been a fan of bass fishing for as long as I can remember.

I've spent as much of my life fishing as decency allowed, and sometimes I don't let even that get in my way.

Fishing is such great fun, I have often felt, that it really ought to be done in bed

Anyone can be a fisherman in May.

I'd rather go fishing for three years.

Fishing is a condition of mind wherein you cannot possibly have a bad time.

I trudged around on the muddy river bottom for half an hour, patiently waiting to drown, before giving up and slogging my way back to shore.

During my addled career as a trout fisherman I have gone on a lot of wild-goose chases, and I ruefully expect to go on a lot more before I hang up my waders

There is one distinctive charm about fishing - its fascinations will stand any climate. You may sit crouching on ice over a hole inside the arctic circle, or on a Windsor chair by the side of the River Lea in the so-called temperate zone, or you may squat in a canoe on an equatorial river, with the surrounding atmosphere forty-five percent mosquito, and if you are fishing you will enjoy yourself.

I have learned that I am also a person who has to be able to go fishing whenever I can and for as long as I want to go. It is a silly thing, but there it is.

It's not the fish you catch, it's the peace of mind you take home at the end of the day.

Fishing from a boat seems like dilettante bullshit - like hunting wild boar with a can of spray paint from the safety of a pick-up truck

A mystery is not a puzzle waiting to be solved, but rather something for which there is no human solution. Mystery's offspring is not frustration but awe, and that sense of awe grows in tandem with knowledge.

Once a man would spend a week patiently waiting if he missed a stage coach, but now he rages if he misses the first section of a revolving door.

There is nothing so enervating and exhausting as this hopeless waiting. I dare say this is only a transition period. I will and shall have a victory some day. If the powers that be have shown me so little favor as to place me in this world and make me what I am, the result must be accordingly.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.

Who waiteth for dead man's shoes will go long barefoot.

Six months of looking for a job had made me an expert at picking out the people who, like me, were hurrying up to wait - in somebody's outer anything for a chance to make it through their inner doors to prove that you could type two words a minute, or not drool on your blouse while answering difficult questions about your middle initial and date of birth.

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.