A River Runs Through It Quotes: Norman Maclean's Best-Loved Lines
Norman Maclean was seventy-three when A River Runs Through It came out in 1976, a short book about his family, fly fishing on the Big Blackfoot River and the younger brother he couldn't save. It has been quoted ever since, at funerals, on riverbanks and in the margins of a great many second-hand copies.
These are the lines readers come back to most, with a little about where each one sits in the story.
For: the people we love and can't quite reach
The Quotes
'In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.'
The opening line. Maclean's father was a Presbyterian minister who taught his sons to cast as carefully as he taught them scripture, and the whole book follows from this sentence.
'It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.'
This comes from the father's last sermon, near the end of the book. It's the closest Maclean comes to saying out loud what happened to his brother Paul, who was brilliant on the river and impossible to help off it.
'...we can love completely without complete understanding.'
The same sermon, a few sentences on. If one line explains why people choose this book for a funeral reading, it's this one. It doesn't pretend we can fix the people we love, or even fully know them. It just says the love counts anyway.
'The Lord has blessed us all today. It's just that he has been particularly good to me.'
A lighter moment, the old minister after a good day on the water, with a father's pride showing straight through the prayer. It's a useful reminder that the book is funny in places, and warm, as well as sad.
'Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.'
The start of the closing passage, and the line most people mean when they search for the book's quotes. The river carries everything in it: the family, the fishing, the words, the people who are gone.
'Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.'
'I am haunted by waters.'
The last line of the book. Five words, and they hold the whole story.
The Book
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean
If you only know the 1992 film with Brad Pitt, the book is worth an evening. It's short, and Maclean's sentences are slower and stranger than anything a screen can manage.
The Reflection
I think this book lasts because almost everyone has a Paul. Someone close whose life went a way we couldn't follow, who we loved and argued with and couldn't reach. Maclean doesn't tidy that up. He just stands in the river and remembers.
There's comfort in that. The sermon never says understanding will come. It says love doesn't need to wait for it.
The Question to Sit With
Who do I love without fully understanding?
A Gentle Pause
For the love that has to loosen its grip a little, I recorded a meditation on letting go.
Words for the Wall
Shop this print: Closing Passage with Vintage Trout
There are a good few River Runs prints in the shop, gathered together on the Norman Maclean page. The closing line hangs over my own photograph of mist on the River Lot near where I live in France, and there's a plain full closing passage, the opening line with a sketched fly fisherman, and the father's sermon in Each One of Us Here Today.
If you'd like a literary prescription in your inbox each week, you can sign up here, and you'll get my free Literary First Aid Kit as a welcome.
The book link is an Amazon affiliate link, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.