Words to live by

Brook trout (left) and brown trout allow anglers to create their own dreams.

For more than four decades, I’ve played around with words: bringing them to light, examining them, fixing  them up, moving them around, and the end result is to make them mean a little bit more than what they should mean to most people.

That’s what this writing game is all about: making the reader find something of beauty and value about this great outdoors. Here I’ve collected some words by other writers that when read aloud or at a private moment, will create wonderful word pictures. Following each quote is where and when these quotes first appeared.

*The closer one lives to nature, the less he is affected by the chances and changes of life. -- Archibald Rutledge, An American Hunter, 1937.

*It is not, he muttered, the hasty ascent up the thorn tree when you are being chased by a rhino that hurts so much. It is the long trip down. -- Robert Ruar, The Honey Badger, 1965.

Read outdoor literature & find some favorite quotes.

*As he gets closer, it will dawn on you that there is simply no place you can go to avoiid his six tons of murder. He can easily outrun the fastest sprinter with his deceptive shuffle, and if you're thinking about climbing a tree, don’t bother. He’ll either knock you out of it personally or toot up a couple of chums to share in the festivities. If 12,000 pounds of screaming, screeching, infuriated  elephant bearing down on you has somehow rattled your nerves to the point that you miss that four-by-six-inch spot on his forehead, or your bullet fails to penetrate the two-and-one-half-feet of tough, spongy, honey-combed bone that protects his brain, then you may as well forget it. The most talented mortuary cosmetician in the world couldn’t rewire you so your own mother would know if you were face-up or down. -- Peter Hathaway Capstick, Death In The Long Grass, 1977.

*I still enjoy the company of most dogs more than that of most people, because dogs are capable of uncomplicated enthusiasm. -- John Gierach, Standing In A River Waving A Stick, 1999.

A quote that can easily be believed in.

*We keep our memories in the same place we bury dogs and pals who are no longer with us. We keep these treasures in the vaults that hold the sights of geese pitching into a set of field decoys, and quail buzzing out of a brushy corner by a split-rail fence. And when the time comes when it’s easier to remember old times than to gather up new ones, it is to this place that we go, you and I, to watch for the last flight at sunset. -- Steve Smith, Picking your Shots, 1986.

*Not only did turkeys originate Murphy’s Law, they have rewritten several of its postulates. And what they make go wrong has gone wrong, and then gotten worse, they really get down to work and create trouble. -- Tom Kelly, Tenth Legion, 1973.

*The deer hunter habitually watches the next bend, the duck hunter watches the skyline, the bird hunter watches the dog; the non-hunter does not watch. -- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949.

*There is another answer to the question of why man hunts. He hunted before he had fire. If he was brave and skilled his family ate. If not, they starved. He no longer hunts from necessity. He hunts because he is the end product of a thousand gerations of hunters. He has inherited the love and enjoyment of it, as the artist has inherited the skills and desires of the primitive man who first drew  pictures on the wall of a cave. When he no longer does it he will be a far weaker man than he is today. -- Ben East, The Ben East Hunting Book, 1974.

*I never go to rivers to kill hecatombs of trout or, actually, any trout; I go to unkill parts of myself that otherwise might die. -- Nick Lyons, Fishing Widows, 1874.

Catching fish or shooting game isn’t about a limit. It’s about the experience.

*I fish not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect so many of the other concerns are equally unimportant--and not nearly as much fun. -- Robert Traver, Anatomy If A Fisherman, 1864.

*If a man is really intelligent, there’s practically nothing a good dog can’t teach him. -- Robert Ruark, The Old Man & The Boy, 1957.

*To the sensitive gunner nothing can equal a bird and a dog and a gun in trilogy. -- George Bird
Evans, Men Who Shot, 1983.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors