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.

More Great Quotes

Norman Maclean has a way with words. He has a way of analyzing a story so that you can see it, and as if that wasn't enough, he usually tags some profound philosophical insight onto the end. I usually learn something about myself, or maybe just human nature when I sit down with one of his stories.

"...old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself."

"It is in the world of slow-time that truth and art are found."
Perhaps why I don't like to live quickly. Why I take extreme pleasure in escaping to the mountains on a camping trip, where stripped of the modern world and left only with what does not not need to be plugged in, I can finally contemplate what is needed, what is beautiful, and what is true...

"Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happend and restore some of the missing parts---hopefully, even the arch to the sky."

For the past year and a half, this is the exercise I have tried to devote myself to. When it comes to the catastrophe of my marriage, I try to avoid sentimentality or fantasy, because they kept me from onfronting the crisis that was my marriage. I imagined a different person than my husband was, how people would reject me for leaving him if it came to that, how I was a terrible person for not being the embodiment of strength to tolerate the abandonment I experienced in our relationship. I re-trace so often the catastrophe of our marriage, and ask myself, like this book, how I could have stopped the train of disaster that was bearing down upon me? How could I have saved the life of our marriage? This book seeks an answer to the tragedy of 13 lives lost in the Mann Gulch Fire. I seek the answer to the tragedy of a broken commitment.

Quotes I can relate to

Norman Maclean is one of my favorite authors for the very reason that I often discover truths about life or myself in the course of reading his works. These sentences really resonate with me:

"The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead."

"Coming to recognize you are wrong is like coming to recongize you are sick. You feel bad long before you admit you have any symptoms and certainly long before you are willing to take your medicine"