Fishing Quotes
1. There is a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.
2. He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.
3. You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.’ She pointed to the shelf opposite. ‘Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.
4. You roll back to me.
5. Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.
6. 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.
7. How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?
8. These enthusiasts often like to hang signs that say “Gone Fishin'” or “Gone Huntin'”. But what these slogans really mean is “Gone Killing.
9. Anyone can be a fisherman in May.
10. Teach all men to fish, but first teach all men to be fair. Take less, give more. Give more of yourself, take less from the world. Nobody owes you anything, you owe the world everything.
11. As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.
12. When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening’s Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. […] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn’t watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless ’em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don’t hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.
13. And chase hard and good and with no mistakes and do not overrun them.
14. I fish because I love to . . . because I love the environs where trout are found . . . because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip . . . 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 unimportant––and not nearly so much fun.
15. I can’t bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour–or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.
16. …as the old saying goes: if you teach a man to fish, he will feed himself for a lifetime. But if you just give him a fishing pole, he’ll have to teach himself.
17. …I’m momentarily transfixed, torn between curiosity and fear. I can pull it up the gently sloping mud bank, but then what? Already thought is lagging behind events, as the blotchy brown mass slides up wet mud toward me, its amorphous margins flowing into the craters left by retreating feet. In the center of the yard-wide disc is a raised turret where two eyes open and close, flashing black. And it’s bellowing. A loud rhythmic sound that is at first inexplicable until I realize that those blinking eyes are its spiracles, now sucking in air instead of water, which it is pumping out via gill slits on its underside. And all the while it brandishes that blade, stabbing the air like a scorpion…
18. He can’t have gone, he said “Christ know he can’t have gone. He’s making a turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and her remembers something of it.” The he felt the gentle touch on the line and he was happy.
19. Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?
20. [A]ngling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
21. It’s a fine, warm day,” Henry replied. “I thought a spot of fishing?”
“Just the thing!” said Felix. “Will you join us, Lucy?” Lucy felt Kitty and Sophia staring at her. Well-bred ladies, evidently, did not fish.
“Oh, no! I assure you, Mr. Crowley-Cumberbatch, I have given up those hoyden pursuits of my youth.” She turned to Toby. “I haven’t been fishing in ages. I can’t remember the last time.”
“Really, Luce?” Toby sounded incredulous. “Henry—is it true?”
Henry sawed away at a slice of ham. “If you count six days as ages, then I suppose it’s true. But if you can’t remember six days back, Lucy, and you’ve forgotten Felix’s Christian name, I’m concerned for you. Perhaps you’ve been spending too much time with Aunt Matilda.
22. And, as always, I thank my family who are an amazing network of support.
23. Bycatch and discards are a fact of life to a fisherman. There is no fishing method that catches only the quarry. …The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about a third of what is caught worldwide, some 29 million tons, goes over the side. This takes what is hauled from the sea to around 132 million tons a year. Add to that the number of organisms that are killed or damaged by net, line, or trap and are never landed–such as whales, porpoises, turtles, and birds–and the number of animals destroyed on the bottom, and the total catch by fishermen reaches something more like 220 million tons a year. Consider that much of the weight of palatable fish is head, cartilage, bone, and offal, which goes over the side or is thrown away by processors. Consider also that about 44 million tons of fish are caught to make industrial products and food for farmed fish. Consider that some of the palatable fish caught will be turned into products for other than human consumption–as cat food, for instance. Consider that there may be an element of waste because some fish will not sell. Taking all these things into account, it is possible to conclude that the amount of protein eaten by someone or something is maybe less than 20 percent of the 104 million tons landed, and only 10 percent of the amount of marine animals destroyed annually in the oceans. These are rough figures, but, given a wide margin of error, they are about right. So catching wild fish is a wasteful business.
24. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.
25. Nature remains focused on survival.
26. By 2030, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, fish farming will dominate fish supplies. Given how wrong the FAO has been in the past–saying catches were going up when, in fact, they were going down–this statement is worth examining carefully. When you do, you find it to be an observation of previous trends, not a reflection of what could happen or what people might want–in the same way as Red Delicious was once far and away the most popular apple in the United States because it was basically the only apple you could get. The FAO is simply observing that fish farming is the fastest growing form of food production in the world–growing at 9 percent a year and by 12-13 percent in the United States. Nobody is asking us whether we want this. It is just happening. The continued destruction of mangrove swamps in poor countries to provide shrimp for people living in rich countries is simply the market operating in a vacuum untroubled by ethics. It is a reflection of what will go on happening if we do not find ways of exercising any choice in the matter.
27. From Great Barrington ma, David Ruddy graduated the Ohio Wesleyan University in 2006 with a double honors in Environmental Studies & Politics and Government.
28. Without the fisherman, there is no fish.
29. Bass Fishing Hub is a community of anglers helping people catch more fish. Shop our eCommerce website for guaranteed low prices & join our Facebook Group!
30. Nature may have even less patience than politicians.
31. gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops.
32. Newfoundlanders debated over when “the cod was coming back”. Few dared ask if. Or what happens to the ocean if they don’t come back?
33. By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among the changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation.
34. When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.
35. People fish because they are searching for something. Often it is not for a fish.
36. Fishing encourages escapism.
37. Asking an angler why he or she needs so many fishing rods is like asking a woman why she has so many pairs of shoes.
38. Fly-fishing in England has a sense of homeliness to it.
39. I am free, so I will go forth and fish – as a man alive.
40. Shorten your line, focus your casts, and slow things down. Enjoy the magic of local fishing.
41. Angling is like the lover who generously and passionately gave us our first kiss, who stole our heart and set the unforgettable benchmark for all who followed.
42. Choosing to become a fly-fisher, or at least committing to being a fly-only angler, makes me feel like I’m washing away the grime from my fishing tackle to reveal the beauty of what lies beneath.
43. Fishing enables us to get closer to nature.
44. Fishing unlocks the primeval hunting gene.
45. Fly-fishing encourages us to dream – of rose-tinted sunsets and lazy spring days when swallows swoop and the hedgerows are blossomed in brilliant white.
46. Teach a man to fish and you’ve fed him for a lifetime…unless, of course, he doesn’t like sushi – then you’ll have to buy him a Kelly Kettle, hobo stove and frying pan.
47. I go fishing for reasons other than catching fish.
48. Exotic fishing? If I’d wanted to spend a week in Tropical Itchybotty then I’d have bought the cream in advance.
49. I could tell you that the flies were Ecdyonurus dispar, or Soumatti meddup, but I’m hopeless at entomology. Conclusion? ‘Little brown things fluttering above the water’.
50. Teach a man to fish and you’ve fed him for a lifetime. Unless, of course, he doesn’t like sushi – then you’ll have to buy him a Kelly Kettle, hobo stove and frying pan as well.
51. On what reasonable grounds would sincere, informed environmentalists refuse to join animal advocates in a campaign to protect increasingly threatened fish populations from the snapping teeth of humanity?
52. With a fly rod, anglers are not casting to a fish; rather to a circle of dreams: ripples that spread into every aspect of their lives.
53. By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer – the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the twentieth century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.
54. Fly-fishing is the simplest, purest, most skilful and pleasurable way to catch a fish.
55. Fly-fishing is an act of hope that leads to a net full of fish and a head full of dreams.
56. How much above zero still produces zero is not known.
57. Living near the Hawaiian fishing village of Milolii on the Island of Hawaii put me in frequent contact with the Hawaiians. I found them to be good people that treated me well and we were harmonious neighbors.
58. Marine ecology is complex and tightly interwoven.
59. What I liked about fishing at the break of day was to be a spectator to the whole of nature gently arousing itself from sleep. And it always seemed that part of that awakening was a fresh sense that this day was not ‘another day,’ for there is no such thing when the world awakens in this manner. Rather, every day was a ‘new day.
60. The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her.
