“Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise,your wandering silences and bright trouvailles,dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish...saying too little, then too much.Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them,the archetypal voices sing offkey;the old actor cannot read his friends,and nevertheless he reads himself aloud,genuis hums the auditorium dead.The line must terminate.Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetimeknotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”

“The fish is my friend too," he said aloud. "I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.”

“In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

“The next best thing to fishing is thinking about it or talking about it, or both. The well-read angler reflects more vividly on his pastime. And usually fishes better, too. The more you read about fishing, the greater will be your enjoyment, on-stream and off.”

“I am a siren, and for my adoration of mankind, have been caught in fishing nets one time too many. And in those fishing nets I have learned too many unfavorable things about human intentions and the lack of trust and goodwill; I'm not going to allow myself to be caught, anymore. Sirens do well at singing the sirens' song and dragging vile people to their deaths, and for good reason!”

“Guys don't like it when you get too heavy, I've noticed. They especially don't like it when you try to talk too much about the future. They're like little woodland animals. Everything's well and good when you're just doling out the nuts and everything's cool. But the minute you bring out the net to try to catch them - even if it's for their own good, like to help them escape a forest fire - all hell breaks loose.”