Patrick F Mcmanus Quotes

There is no greater fan of fly fishing then the worm.

The machete was needed anytime you had to slash out your own trail. This necessity arose more often than a person who is not a kid with a machete might think.

What's the hurry?" he said "This door is locked," Tully told him. "So?" "Can you pick a lock?" "I'll give it a try." "Be my guest" Tully said, stepping to one side. Pap blew the lock away with the shotgun. He pushed the door open with the barrel.

It's been a long, hard day, and bit by bit you have been transformed into a single, vertical, barely ambulatory ache. All that awaits you now is another long, lonely night on the hard, cold ground. "What am I doing out here?" you ask yourself. "I must be mad!" Indeed, you are mad. Otherwise right now you could be warm and cozy and stretched out in front of your beloved TV, munching popcorn and swigging down ice-cold brew, just like a civilized person. "Oh well," you sigh to yourself. "I'd better stop and get a fire going.

While I was explaining to my own doctor that I was planning to undertake some serious exercise, I happened to mention that I thought I had lost quite a bit of weight since my last physical. “You didn’t lose it,” he said. “It just slipped around to your rear where you can’t see it.

One word of caution, though, should you ever buy commercial worms. If you go into a backwoods gas station and find a large, rough-looking woman behind the cash register, don’t ask, “Do you have worms?” My friend Retch Sweeney did that a while back. He should get out of his full-body cast any day now.

Another thing I like about fishing with maggots is that if left alone they turn into flies. What kind of future is that for them? You have saved them from that particular horror, for which they should thank you copiously.

Rancid was poor. He didn't seem to know that he was poor, however, and I never had the heart to tell him, because he was the happiest person I'd ever met. If he had known he was poor, of course, then he would have been sad and miserable all the time. As it was, Rancid was able to live out his whole life in blissful ignorance of the fact that he was poor.

Pap said, "Lend me those bolt cutters, Bo" "They're in the back of the Explorer." The old man got out the bolt cutter, walked around and snipped one of the leads to the battery on each of the ATV's. The others stood in the darkness watching him, listening to the snip-snip of the bolt cutter. "Not a bad idea," said Dave. "That way is any of them get past us, he's going to be on foot." "There's that," Tully said. "And then there's the fact that the old man loves bolt cutters...

I believe it is the inability of beginning writers to achieve at least a certain degree of detachment from their writing that defeats so many of them before they even get started. Without this distancing, any criticism of your writing will seem devastating, even incapacitating, whereas with the proper amount of detachment it will seem merely cruel and unusual punishment.

One reason diplomats have so much trouble coming to any kind of agreement is that they sit in soft chairs around a large table with yellow pads in front of them to doodle on. They're too comfortable for serious negotiation. My theory is that world peace could be achieved in short order if the diplomats were made to hunker out in a barnyard and draw their proposals on the ground with sticks. For hundreds of years, hunters have employed the hunker successfully in negotiating with farmers for permission to hunt their property. I myself am an expert hunkerer and would be willing to teach the technique free of charge to both Russian and American diplomats, just so we can get the present mess straightened out in a hurry.

First of all, one is either a panicker or one isn’t, and the occasion of being lost is no time to start fretting about a flaw in one’s character. My own theory holds that it is best, if one is a panicker, to get the panic out of the system as quickly as possible

Once, I returned home from work, hung up my coat, dropped my briefcase on the floor, and walked into the kitchen. Bun was at the stove cooking supper. She seemed different. “You’re home early,” she said, without looking up. She sounded different, too. Oddly, she appeared much taller than she had that morning. Then she turned around. There was a strange woman in my house cooking supper! We went through the usual leaping and yelling and feinting at each other that occurs on such occasions, until at last recognition dawned, she being the wife and mother of the family to whom I had sold our house the previous month.

Poking at a campfire with a stick is one of life’s great satisfactions.

Bobcat?” he says. “What bobcat?

The alligator was very dead and had been that way a long time and was dried up and cracked and coming apart at the seams. Nobody wanted to take pictures of the dead alligator since it already had enough problems.

The commissioners were only politicians anyway and easily replaced.