Thomas McGuane > Quotes

“It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.”
― Thomas McGuane

“I may be the wrong person for my life.”
― Thomas McGuane

“Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.”
― Thomas McGuane

“We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.”
― Thomas McGuane

“By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.”
― Thomas McGuane, Nobody's Angel

“That food was so bad I can't wait for it to become a turd and leave me.”
― Thomas McGuane, To Skin a Cat

“The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.”
― Thomas McGuane, Panama

“I considered the wonder of the things that befell me, convinced that my life was the best omelet you could make with a chainsaw. -- Panama”
― Thomas McGuane

“Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.”
― Thomas McGuane

“I like to be tired. In some ways, that’s the point of what I do. I don’t want to be thinking when I go to bed, or, if there is some residue from the day, I want it to drain out and precipitate me into nothingness. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of nonexistence. I view pets with extraordinary suspicion: we need to stay out of their lives. I saw a woman fish a little dog out of her purse once, and it bothered me for a year. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out.”
― Thomas McGuane, Crow Fair: Stories

“They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics.”
― Thomas McGuane

“But it was as if a tiny animal living in the corner of my mind, smaller than a mouse, smaller than an ant, and unobtrusive even considering its size, was saying, 'Bullshit.”
― Thomas McGuane, Driving on the Rim

“After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time they had gone together.”
― Thomas McGuane, The Bushwhacked Piano

“In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.”
― Thomas McGuane, The Bushwhacked Piano

“They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda's family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures.”
― Thomas McGuane

“She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you.”
― Thomas McGuane, The Cadence of Grass: A Novel

“My life was the best omelette you could make with a chainsaw”
― Thomas McGuane, Panama

“At the battle of Waterloo, men formed squares into which the wounded were brought for medical care. At the height of the battle, in the madness of the cannonading and death, the riderless horses of the cavalry, the caisson horses of the slaughtered gun crews attempted to penetrate the squares to be saved by the humans. And in the First World War, men subjected to unparalleled mayhem were stricken more by the plight of the horses than anything else. There is a special grief for the innocent caught up in mankind’s murderous follies.”
― Thomas McGuane

“We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God's Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody's refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert”
― Thomas McGuane, Panama

“Napoleon said that if it weren't for religion the poor would kill the rich. This may be all you needed to know about any human community. The churches were the real police stations, the real keepers of law and order.”
― Thomas McGuane, Driving on the Rim

“I think he was just doing his best, getting along by going along with my mother, whose piety and evangelical fever had preoccupied her family since the last century. She knew no other world - God the Tyrant and supplicant humanity crawling on its belly to be forgiven for sins they never knew they'd committed. 'It's no sense defying the LORD,' she told me. 'He's got all the coons up one tree.”
― Thomas McGuane, Driving on the Rim

“All three make note of the vast share of their fellows, getting, spending, and laying waste their powers, “men that are condemned to be rich,” in Walton’s words. He observes, “there be as many miseries beyond riches, as on this side of them.” The rich man, he thinks, is like the silkworm which, while seeming to play, is spinning her own bowels and consuming them. One thinks of Thoreau “owning” the farms by knowing them better than their tenants; it is less that the meek shall possess the earth than that “they enjoy what others possess and enjoy not.” The subject of The Compleat Angler is, really, everyday miracles, friends, a dry, warm house, remembered verse, hope. Walton reserves but one spot for envy and invidious comparison: “I envy not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more fish than I do.”
― Thomas McGuane, The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing

“npposiuAt the battle of Waterloo, men formed squares into which the wounded were brought for medical care. At the height of the battle, in the madness of the cannonading and death, the riderless horses of the cavalry, the caisson horses of the slaughtered gun crews attempted to penetrate the squares to be saved by the humans. And in the First World War, men subjected to unparalleled mayhem were stricken more by the plight of the horses than anything else. There is a special grief for the innocent caught up in mankind’s murderous follies.”
― Thomas McGuane

“Telling people to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it's up there.”
― Thomas McGuane, Cloudbursts: New and Collected Stories

“Quinn wanted to make her see that people didn't live like this; but what was the use. No one was going to get her away from Bird Man out there.”
― Thomas McGuane

“he’d paid for should have led me to greater abstraction, but while it’s true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for economic success, I and many of my classmates wanted more physical evidence of our efforts.”
― Thomas McGuane, Crow Fair: Stories

“...wandered into a shoe store. A lone customer stood at the display rack, turning the shoes over, one after another, to look at their soles. Jessica recalled the proverb "Hell is a stylish shoe." A salesman greeted her at the door, a young man with a shaved head and a black turtleneck. Too intimate from the start, he held each selection so close to her face that she had to lean back to get a better look. She felt his breath as he pressed some studded sparkly sneakers on her. Jessica found it fascinating that he thought she would want these, or the next pair he held up--stiletto-heeled jobs that seemed lewd, as did his smirk. The salesman didn't conceal his disappointment when she bought a pair of marked-down Vera Wang flats. She bought them because they seemed so pedestrian. Men preferred women teetering so she chose to walk like a Neanderthal.”
― Thomas McGuane, Crow Fair: Stories

“He paused long enough for me to consider how wonderful life could be when it had great literature-style items, such as coincidence and fate and elegant ironies.”
― Thomas McGuane, The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing

“I still don’t see why you think this is a matter of conviction when it’s just an extended bar fight.”
― Thomas McGuane, Ninety-two in the Shade

“was released. There were no rises to be seen any longer, though fish rose fairly well to our own flies, until we had six. Then the whole factory shut down and nothing would persuade a trout to rise again. While it had lasted, all of British Columbia that existed had been the few square inches around my dry-fly. With the rise over, the world began to reappear: trees, lake, river, village, wet clothes. It is this sort of possession you look for when angling. To watch the river flowing, the insects landing and hatching, the places where trout hold, and to insinuate the supple, binding movement of tapered line until, when the combination is right, the line becomes rigid and many of its motions are conceived at the other end.”
― Thomas McGuane, The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing