"You like to tell true stories, don't you? he (my father) asked, and I answered, "Yes, I like to tell stories that are true."

Then he asked, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?

"Only then will yo understand what happened and why.

"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

Now nearly all those I loved and did not undersand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening.  Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the big blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.  The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time.  On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops.  Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 104

Once my father came back with another question.  "Do you think I could have helped him?" he asked.  Even if I might have thought longer, I would have made the same answer.  "Do you think I could have helped him?"  I answered.  We stood waiting in deference to each other.  How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions?

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 103

Conversation between Norman and his father about Paul's quandry

"You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,"  he said.  "By help I don't mean a coutesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.
"Help," he said, "is giving part of yourself ot somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
"So it is," he said, using and old homiletic transition, "that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves.  Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. and even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.  It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, 'Sorry, we are just out of that part.'"
I told him, "you make it too tough.  Help doesn't have to be anything that big."
He asked me, "Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?"
"She might," I told him.  "In fact, yes, I think she does."
"Do you think you help him?" he asked me.
"I try to," I said. "My trouble is I don't know him. In fact, one of my trouble is that I don't even know whether he needs help.  I don't know, that's my trouble."
"That should have been my text," my father said.  "We are willing to help Lord, but what if anything is needed?
"I still know how to fish," he concluded.  "Tomorrow we will go fishing with him."

It is a shame I do not understand him (Paul)

Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help.  We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting of instincts.  It will not let us go.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 28-29

It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 26

"When I realized how long I'd been out and how close I'd come to leaving it forever, our little home seemed to glitter like cheap jewelry. I was overjoyed not to be dead.  Generally the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke.  There was no touching the hem of mystery, no little occasion when any of us thought--well, speaking for myself only, I suppose--that our lungs were filled with light, or anything like that.  I had a moment's glory that night, though.  I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn't tolerate any other place."

-Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son (pg. 34)