Mike Reuther > Mike's Quotes

“Calling fishing a hobby is like calling brain surgery a job.”
― Paul Schullery

“A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
― Jim Bouton

“No thinking - that comes later. You must write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is... to write, not to think!”
― James Ellison Mike Rich

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Write from the heart. A book without a pulse is like a person without a spirit." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications”
― Linda F. Radke

“Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant
”
― Dorothy Allison

“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.” ~spoken by Augustus McCrae”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I fish because I love to. Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly. Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape. Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing what they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion. Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed, or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility, and endless patience. Because I suspect that men are going this way for the last time and I for one don't want to waste the trip. Because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters. Because in the woods I can find solitude without loneliness. ... And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant and not nearly so much fun.”
― Robert Traver

“We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?”
― Shirley Graham Du Bois

“Anytime you don’t have a picture in your head, you’re in trouble or will be soon.”
― Jerry Cleaver, Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course

“The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again... the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of the old October.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth

“There are people in my life who sometimes worry about me when I go off into the fields and streams, not realizing that the country is a calm, gracious, forgiving place and that the real dangers are found in the civilization you have to pass through to get there. When”
― John Gierach, Trout Bum

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
― James Dickey

“You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“There seems to be plenty of it,' was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”
― George Saunders

“If people don't occasionally walk away from you shaking their heads, you're doing something wrong.”
― John Gierach

“Whether or not I am a writer,” I wrote, “I have—and this is both my curse and my virtue—cultivated the instinct of one, an aversion for the herd, without, in my unhappy case, the ability to harness and articulate that aversion.”
― Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes

“Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground. The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.”
― Bernard Malamud, The Natural

“The crowd and its team had finally understood that in games, as in many things, the ending, the final score, is only part of what matters. The process, the pleasure, the grain of the game count too.”
― Thomas Boswell, Why Time Begins on Opening Day

“Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more”
― Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“It's not that I'm dumb to the beauty of things. I take all the beautiful things to heart, and they fuck my heart till I about die from it.”
― Nico Walker, Cherry

“Thoughts of stardom, fame, riches he’d long assigned to that dusty bin of youth, when anything was possible, before reality creeped upon him, and life’s miseries had smothered him.”
― Mike Reuther, Searching for Sanity