Quotes from Sage's readings and a photo from the archives

Photo: Virginia City, Nevada. Winter 1988-89

“Fly rods are like Cornish pasties—both are best made for love rather than for money.”
-“Morris the Rodmaker,” Robert Traver (A while back there was quite a discussion in my blog about Cornish pasties and there’s been off and on discussions about fly fishing, so I had to include this quote that ties the two together.)

“If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.”
-“Dead-Eye” Dick Cheney on the Rush Limbaugh show, commenting on the war in Iraq.

When Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that things in Iraq are going "remarkably well," he must have been speaking not as the vice president (not even Cheney is that delusional) but as a man with an ongoing financial interest in Halliburton, which continues to profit from the otherwise disastrous war.
Arianna Huffington in response to Cheney’s comments

…to purchase peace at home by sowing chaos abroad…
-Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here (and he wasn’t talking about our current administration)

Men of action have a habit of consigning past loves and indiscretions to oblivion in the hope of better things to come.
-Writing about Andre’ Malraux, Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here

"The secret divinity of the twentieth century is Science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man. You know as well as I do that psychoanalysis has never made a man.”
-Andre’ Malraux, as quoted by Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here

“There is the positive hero and the negative hero, and the two do not mix. The negative hero usually has far greater poetic power. Lawrence and Che’ Guevara were negative heroes. Alexander the Great was a positive hero. De Gaulle, all things considered, was a positive hero; he certainly lacked the masochism of a Lawrence. But the negative heor is a victim. If Guevara today were President of Bolivia it would never have worked. A hero like that requires the crucifixion.”
-Andre’ Malraux, as quoted by Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here

It’s far easier to become a star again than become one.”
-Andre’ Malraux as quoted by Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here

In France intellectuals are usually incapable of opening an umbrella.
-Andre’ Malraux (a Frenchman) as quoted by Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here

“Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin”
Werner Herzog as quoted by Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here

“When the pulpit becomes an echo of the pew, it loses, I think, almost all of its reason for existence.”
-Gardner C, Taylor in The Christian Century

Time was one of Gandhi’s obsessions. Each minute, he held, was a gift of God to be used in the service of man… He used each pencil right down to an ungrippable stub, because he held that it represented the work of a fellow human being and to waste it would indicate indifference to his labors.”
-Freedom at Midnight, “Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

The implications of a dam exceeds it true level in the scale of environmental catastrophes. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh metropolises, mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam… possibly the reaction is so violent because rivers as the ultimate metaphor of existence and dams destroys rivers, humiliating nature...
John McPhee, The Founding Fish (I thought I’d give dams equal time after my Abbey post).