Quotes about fishing
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Jack Kerouac photo

“I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Letter to Ed White (5 July 1950) as published in The Missouri Review, Vol. XVII, No. 3, 1994, page 137, and also quoted in Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster (1996) by Steve Turner, p. 117

Thomas Szasz photo
Ernest Hemingway photo

“My big fish must be somewhere.”

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

Frank Herbert photo

“If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Source: The Dune Storybook

Raymond Chandler photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Charlie Kaufman photo
Nicholas Sparks photo

“I love you more than there are fishes in the sea and higher than the moon”

Variant: I love you more than there are stars in the sky and fish in the sea.
Source: At First Sight

Rick Riordan photo
Gabriel García Márquez photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Nicholas Sparks photo

“Peacocks have the bright feathers. Fish have the long tails. Women have the mall.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: My Double Life

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
Context: There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Robin McKinley photo
Douglas Adams photo
Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Bashō Matsuo photo

“Why so scrawny, cat?
Starving for fat fish or mice…
Or backyard love?”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Source: Japanese Haiku

Brandon Mull photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Marshall McLuhan photo
Philip K. Dick photo

“Fish cannot carry guns.”

Source: VALIS (1981)

Zora Neale Hurston photo

“Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 20, p. 193.
Context: Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Kim Harrison photo
Libba Bray photo
Meg Cabot photo
Chelsea Handler photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Mercedes Lackey photo
William Faulkner photo

“My mother is a fish.”

Source: As I Lay Dying (1930)

“Sure, it was your idea and your fly, but he caught the big fish. Remember, fairness is a human idea largely unknown in nature.”

John Gierach (1946) American sportswriter

Source: Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders: A John Gierach Fly-Fishing Treasury

Dr. Seuss photo

“One fish Two fish Red fish Blue fish!”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

“A bird may love a fish but where would they build a home together?”

Joseph Stein (1912–2010) American playwright

Source: Fiddler on the Roof

Henry David Thoreau photo
Jessica Simpson photo

“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it… it says "Chicken… by the Sea."”

Jessica Simpson (1980) American singer-songwriter and actress

While eating "Chicken of the Sea" canned tuna
Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica, "Newlyweds Clean House" [1.01], 19 August 2003

Ernest Hemingway photo
Rick Riordan photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.”

Radio broadcast, London, Dieu Protège La France [God protect France], October 21, 1940 ( partial text http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/LaFrance.html).
The Second World War (1939–1945)

David Levithan photo
Mindy Kaling photo
Aristophanés photo

“Sausage-Seller: You [demagogues] are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troublous times that you line your pockets.”

tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Kn.+864
ὅπερ γὰρ οἱ τὰς ἐγχέλεις θηρώμενοι πέπονθας.
ὅταν μὲν ἡ λίμνη καταστῇ, λαμβάνουσιν οὐδέν·
ἐὰν δ᾽ ἄνω τε καὶ κάτω τὸν βόρβορον κυκῶσιν,
αἱροῦσι· καὶ σὺ λαμβάνεις, ἢν τὴν πόλιν ταράττῃς.
Knights, line 864-867
Dialog aimed at the politician Cleon, symbolizing demagogues for the author.
Knights (424 BC)
Source: The Knights

Laura Ingalls Wilder photo
Robert Jordan photo
Janet Fitch photo
Jasper Fforde photo
Meg Cabot photo

“Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) American novelist, poet, essayist

Source: Wolf False Memoir

Scott Adams photo
Rick Riordan photo
Alice Sebold photo
Rick Riordan photo
Drew Barrymore photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Dr. Seuss photo
Yann Martel photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Brandon Sanderson photo

“I am a fish.”

Source: Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

Diana Gabaldon photo
Rick Riordan photo
Linda Ellerbee photo
Steven Wright photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
Leo Tolstoy photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Francois Rabelais photo

“We have here other fish to fry.”

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fifth Book (1564), Chapter 12.

Starhawk photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Francis Maitland Balfour photo
Carl Safina photo

“Being neurotic is like shooting fish in a barrel, and missing them.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

John Maynard Keynes photo

“How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?”

"A Short View of Russia" (1925); Originally three essays for the Nation and Athenaeum, later published separately as A Short View of Russia (1925), then edited down for publication in Essays in Persuasion (1931)
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - John Maynard Keynes / Quotes / Essays in Persuasion (1931)
Essays in Persuasion (1931), A Short View of Russia (1925)

Francis Escudero photo
Rashi photo

“The flavour of a fish which comes out of the sea at Acre is not similar to the flavour of a fish which comes out of the sea in Spain.”

Rashi (1040–1105) French rabbi and commentator

Commenting on Gen. 1:10; why does it say "seas", not "sea" - because the nature of the sea varies from place to place.
Commentary on Genesis

Oliver Goldsmith photo

“[To Mr. Johnson] If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

From James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791), April 27, 1773.

Francesco Petrarca photo
Halldór Laxness photo

“I say, and have always said, and will always say: the fish that does not sing throughout the whole world is a dead fish.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Merchant Gúðmúnsen
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Sarah Palin photo

“But I didn't believe in the theory that human beings – thinking, loving beings – originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea. Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys who eventually swung down from trees; I believed we came about through a random process, but were created by God.”

Going Rogue: An American Life (2009), p. 217 http://books.google.com/books?id=Wx00mzMRGH8C&pg=PA217&dq=%22But+I+didn't+believe+in+the+theory%22, quoted in Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign, The New York Times, 2009-11-14 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/15book.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&ref=books,
2014

Roger Manganelli photo