More Great Quotes

Finished reading this book yesterday evening. Norman Maclean has a rare gift for not only telling a story but extracting larger life meaning from that story. Here are a few of the quotes that I appreciated in the last 100 pages or so.

"Maybe when you almost die before you live there
is a mechanism in you that makes you reduce your memories of death so most of life will not be based on death."

"...I recognized that, in the wide world anywhere, 'Now we know, now we know' is one of its most beautiful poems"

Yes...this I do know. After all the pain and suffering of struggling to learn a lesson, finally knowing can be both a relief and an agony. There are things that I have learned that others will not be able to understand unless they walk in my shoes, and the same is true for their life circumstances. But we can all learn compassion from the fruit of our suffering, which leads to a better understanding of love.

"...a storyteller should never look at a day as lost if he has learned something about how to tell stories, especially about how to make them shorter."

I guess this is part of what I took from my 5 years of working at NOAA. Some really interesting stories...

"This feeling, when generalized, is a feeling that you will be ready to write if first you can find the right friend to listen to your opening paragraph."

This has been part of my own writing struggle. I need the right friend to feed that creative passion and urge me along. Who knows, maybe it's not just one, but several.