Some Hints About Why We Fish

Fellow Extravaganzers:

My good friend, client and sailor (not fisherman, perhaps to his credit!) Greg Von Gehr gave me a holiday gift of Nick Lyons’ collection of quotations 1,001 Pearls of Fishing Wisdom (Skyhorse Publishing), one section of which is entitled “Some Hints About Why We Fish”, cited excerpts of which include the following observations:

 

“There are some things, of course, that have always defied all forms of rationalization, and probably always will.  Love, for instance.  And faith, maybe….Perhaps it’s as futile and as foolish to ask ‘Why fly fishing?’ as it is to ask ‘Why Jazz?’  As Fats Waller said:  ‘Lady, if you’ve got to ask, you’ll never know.”  Arnold Gingrich

 

“Here I’ll make a confession, or rather two…nothing has given me quite such a kick as fishing.  Everything else has been a bit of a flop in comparison, even women.”  George Orwell

 

“Freud is famous for wondering, ‘What do women want?’  He might have asked a much tougher question:  ‘Why do men fish?’”  James Gorman

 

“No fisherman ever fishes as much as he wants…this is the first great rule of fishing, and it explains a world of otherwise inexplicable behavior.”  Geoffrey Norman

 

“Early on I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world.  First it taught me to look at rivers.  Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included.”  Thomas McGuane

 

“The great charm of fly-fishing is that we are always learning, no matter how long we have been at it, we are constantly making some fresh discovery, picking up some new wrinkle.  If we become conceited through great success, some day the trout will take us down a peg.”  Theodore Gordon

 

“I fish because I love to; because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful…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 important—and not nearly so much fun.”  Robert Traver

 

“Ours is the grandest sport.  It is an intriguing battle of wits between an angler and a trout; and in addition to appreciating the tradition and grace of the game, we play it in the magnificent out-of-doors.”  Ernest G. Schwiebert, Jr.

 

“My favorite thing about fishing is being able to just be.  Being able to get myself as quiet inside as it is outside.”  Sabrina Sojourner

 

“The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.”  John Buchan

 

“The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommend it to me.”  Henry David Thoreau

 

“Yes, this sport fits me—physically, mentally, psychologically.  Why do I love trout?  For the same reasons men do.”  Joan Wulff

 

“We who go a-fishing are a peculiar people.  Like other men and women in many respects, we are like one another, and like no others, in other respects.  We understand each other’s thoughts by an intuition of which we know nothing.  We cast our flies on many waters, where memories and fancies and facts rise, and we take them and show them to each other, and small or large, we are content with our catch.”  W.C. Prime

 

“Nothing is more trying to the patience of fishermen than the remark so often made to them by the profane:  ‘I had not patience enough for fishing’”  Arthur Ransome

 

“There is nothing like the thrill of expectation over the first cast in unfamiliar waters.  Fishing is like gambling, in that failure only excites hope of a fortunate throw next time.”  Charles Dudley Warner

 

“I don’t fish in order to sit atop some predatory or evolutionary hierarchy.  I fish to hook into an entirety.  I fish to trade self-consciousness for creek-consciousness and self-awareness.”  David James Duncan

 

…all of the above confirming that, as ably summed up by Corey Ford and Alastair MacBain, “…a trout fisherman is something that defieth understanding.”

 

Best to all from the scene of it all,

 

Rock Creek Ron

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