Quotes about trout

A collection of quotes on the topic of trout, likeness, love, way.

Quotes about trout

“What's his offense?
Groping for trout in a peculiar river.”

William Shakespeare Measure for Measure

Source: Measure for Measure

“Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!"”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Last line
Breakfast of Champions (1973)

“Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: "What's blocking the traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?"”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Wisdom, Question, Learning

“Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Science

“.. I tell you Dain is a splendid catch. I advise you to set your hooks and reel him in.”

Jessica took a long swallow of her cognac. “This is not a trout, Genevieve. This is a great, hungry shark.”

“Then use a harpoon.”

Loretta Chase book Lord of Scoundrels

Source: Lord of Scoundrels

“Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.”

Richard Brautigan book Trout Fishing in America

Source: Trout Fishing in America

“"Love is a myth", Grandfather Trout said. "Like summer."
"What?"
"In winter," Grandfather Trout said, "summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer."”

John Crowley book Little, Big

Bk. 5, Ch. 4
Source: Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)

Love, Winter, Summer

“We are touring the Ozarks. Here is an abandoned field in which the ragweed is sparse and short. Does this tell us anything about why the mortgage was foreclosed? About how long ago? Would this field be a good place to look for quail? Does short ragweed have any connection with the human story behind yonder graveyard? If all the ragweed in this watershed were short, would that tell us anything about the future of floods in the steam? About the future prospects for bass or trout?”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Natural History: The Forgotten Science" [1938]; Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 62.
1930s

Future

“A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

Quoted in James Charlton's The Writer’s Quotation Book (1980).

Youth

“Oh Brancepeth,’ said the girl, her voice trembling, ‘why haven’t you any money? If only you had the merest pittance - enough for a flat in Mayfair and a little weekend place in the country somewhere and a couple of good cars and a villa in the South of France and a bit of trout fishing on some decent river, I would risk all for love.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Lord Emsworth and Others

Lord Emsworth and Others (1937)

Love, Money, Cars, Girl

“Where the pools are bright and deep
Where the gray trout lies asleep,
Up the river and o'er the lea
That's the way for Billy and me.”

James Hogg (1770–1835) British writer

"A Boy's Song" (1831), line 1; cited from Songs and Ballads by the Ettrick Shepherd (Glasgow: Blackie, 1852) p. 196.

Way

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

November 11, 1854
Referring to an 1849 dairyman's strike, during which there was suspicion of milk being watered down
Journals (1838-1859)
Variant: Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Strong

“Had a buddy of mine caught a rainbow trout, and threw it back. He said he didn't want a gay fish.”

Larry the Cable Guy (1963) American stand-up comedian, actor, country music artist, voice artist

Morning Constitutions (2007)

Fish

“Mr. Llewellyn paused. Mr. Trout had begun to float about the room like something out of Swan Lake, and Mr. Llewellyn disapproved of this. He was apt to be a martinet in his dealings with his legal advisers, demanding that lawyers should behave like lawyers and leave eccentric dancing to the professionals. A man, he held, is either Fred Astaire or he is not Fred Astaire, and if he is not Fred Astaire he should not carry on like him.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

From P.G. Wodehouse's Bachelors Anonymous (1973).

Dance

“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”

Norman Maclean (1902–1990) American author and scholar

"A River Runs Through It", p. 4
A River Runs Through It (1976)

Art, Universe

“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly. What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might…travel.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Henry, Act II, scene V
The Real Thing (1982)

Way, Travel, Idea, Dance

“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 3, "Hort Town" (Ged)

Life, Time, Flying

“To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Love, Children, Beauty, Fish

“King Lear: How hath my fool offended?
Regan: He hath shagged me roughly, against my will, and finished too soon.
King Lear: By force- Pocket? He isn't eight-stone on a feast day- he couldn't shag a cat by force.
Pocket: That's not true, sire. If the cat is distracted with a trout, then - well, uh, never mind.”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Ch 14 - On Tender Horns - pg 177
Fool (2009)

Fools, Cats

“If I could shoot a game bird and still not hurt it, the way I can take a trout on a fly and release it, I doubt if I would kill another one. This is a strange statement coming from a man whose life is dedicated to shooting and gun dogs. For me, there is almost no moment more sublime than when I pull the trigger and see a grouse fall. Yet, as the bird is retrieved I feel a sense of remorse for taking a courageous life. About the time I passed fifty I noticed this conflict becoming more pronounced…”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

The Upland Shooting Life (1971)

Life, Dogs, Way, Feeling

“Orchestras have often been used to conjure up the natural world: Swans, sharks, trout, but not, as far as I know, the often maligned jellyfish.”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra (2008)

World, Nature

“Wherever the trout are, it's beautiful.”

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937) First Czechoslovak president

Beauty

“My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,— if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world — the grazing and nesting in it, — the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, — happier if it needed no help of mine, — this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Praeterita, volume I, chapter IX (1885-1889)

Light, Help, Learning, Nature

“Should I say, that the river (in this place) from shore to shore, and perhaps near half a mile above and below me, appeared to be one solid bank of fish, of various kinds, pushing through this narrow pass of San Juan's into the little lake, on their return down the river, and that the alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close from shore to shore, that it would have easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been harmless? What expressions can sufficiently declare the shocking scene that for some minutes continued, whilst this mighty army of fish were forcing the pass? During this attempt, thousands, I may say hundreds of thousands, of them were caught and swallowed by the devouring alligators. I have seen an alligator take up out of the water several great fish at a time, and just squeeze them betwixt his jaws, while the tails of the great trout flapped about his eyes and lips, ere he had swallowed them. The horrid noise of their closing jaws, their plunging amidst the broken banks of fish, and rising with their prey some feet upright above the water, the floods of water and blood rushing out of their mouths, and the clouds of vapor issuing from their wide nostrils, were truly frightful.”

William Bartram (1739–1823) American naturalist

[Van Doren, Mark, The travels of William Bartram, An American Bookshelf, volume 3, 118–119, 1928, New York, Macy-Masius, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b281934&view=1up&seq=124]
Travels of William Bartram (1791)

Time, Animals, Water, Appearance