Norman Maclean Quotes

I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.

I'm attracted to pathos, because life is mostly pathos. I've had a lot of it in my life.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

That's the thing about suicide. Try as you might to remember how a person lived his life, you always end up thinking about how he ended it.

The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.

Blood and death. That moves me.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

I lost two brothers in an airplane crash, both of them leaving a wife and kids. When I get to Heaven, that's probably the first question I'd like to ask: 'Why was it necessary?'

My biggest fear in life is losing the people I love, and the thing with cancer is that it seems that you can't really control it.

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.

I watched children dying. That will be the image that will stay with me.

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

It's the continuation of everyone's childhood to see these young children who grow up full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder. And within an instant they're gone from this world. It's terrible.

Every war is a national misfortune.

Too many mothers have lost their children, for thousands of different reasons.

It is easy to fall into despair thinking about all that is wrong with the world. The joys seems so small in comparison. Internet videos of cats riding Roombas just can't compete with a father talking about how his dead 13-year-old son had wanted to be a pilot.

There's nothing funny about violence. Death is a real thing.

Serious loss brings you into one of the world's silent fraternities.

A fundamental and unfortunate part of being alive is to suffer loss and to suffer grief.

Cancer has been a dark thread that has run throughout my life. It's taken my friends, my parents. My beautiful son.

When you are confronted with a level of devastating disease and death, you never lose that sense of unbelievable humility.

I've had a lot of big impacts before the music as far as deaths and tragedies and experiences in my life.

...they came to see what happened to their town, to see if it was indeed lying burnt and bleeding. Many of them also came to die.

When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.