Trophy Fish Quotes

She tangled her words like matted fishing lines

We each make our solo voyages to deep, expansive waters. Alone in our contest with the wider world, we test our mettle and seek our trophies, promotions, compliments, and accolades. We strive to be needed and to thereby know that there is a reason for us. We seek to be told we are good because we're too unsure of ourselves to know. Yet often we remain so focused on our neediness that we forget the creatures—human and otherwise—we're drawing into the vortex of our own passion play. All of us have compulsive loves we must forbear. We forget to see that we can engage the world without harming it. And although we fish for approval, the challenge is: to capture our prizes while bringing more to the world than we take.

Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill. Otherwise it was valueless; beautiful from a distance but it couldn’t be tamed or cooked or trained to talk, the only relation they could have to a thing like that was to destroy it. Food, slave or corpse, limited choices; horned and fanged heads sawed off and mounted on the billiard room wall, stuffed fish, trophies

A wasting memory is not only a destroyer; it can deny one's very existence. A day unremembered is like a soul unborn, worse than if it had never been. What indeed was that summer if it is not recalled? That journey? That act of love? To whom did it happen if it has left you with nothing? Certainly not to you. So any bits of warm life preserved by the pen are trophies snatched from the dark, are branches of leaves fished out of the flood, are tiny arrests of mortality.

Be the fish that discovers the water and don't let the moment exceed her weakness

They had nothing. In their houses, there was nothing. At first. You had to stay in the dark of the huts a long while to make out what was on the walls. In the wife's hut a wavy pattern of broad white and ochre bands. In others - she did not know whether or not she was welcome where they dipped in and out all day from dark to light like swallows - she caught a glimpse of a single painted circle, an eye or target, as she saw it. In one dwelling where she was invited to enter there was the tail of an animal and a rodent skull, dried gut, dangling from the thatch. Commonly there were very small mirrors snapping at the stray beams of light like hungry fish rising. They reflected nothing. An impression - sensation - of seeing something intricately banal, manufactured, replicated, made her turn as if someone had spoken to her from back there. It was in the hut where the yokes and traces for the plough-oxen were. She went inside again and discovered insignia, like war medals, nailed just to the left of the dark doorway. The enamel emblem's Red Cross was foxed and pitted with damp, bonded with dirt to the mud and dung plaster that was slowly incorporating it. The engraved lettering on the brass arm-plaque had filled with rust. The one was a medallion of the kind presented to black miners who pass a First Aid exam on how to treat injuries likely to occur underground, the other was a black miner's badge of rank, the highest open to him. Someone from the mines; someone had gone to the gold mines and come home with these trophies. Or they had been sent home; and where was the owner? No one lived in this hut. But someone had; had had possessions, his treasure displayed. Had gone away, or died - was forgotten or was commemorated by the evidence of these objects left, or placed, in the hut. Mine workers had been coming from out of these places for a long, long time, almost as long as the mines had existed. She read the brass arm-plaque: Boss Boy.

A guy once asked me to go with him to Indonesia to help people after the latest tsunami hit. I said yes. I had no idea what I was doing. We arrived in Banda Aceh two weeks after the destruction. (Indonesia alone lost a mind-bending two hundred thousand lives.) We weren’t welcomed by everyone. Most people love the help, sure. But I felt unwelcome when a group of Muslim separatists threatened to kill us. (I have a sixth sense about this kind of thing.) They were opposed to Western interference in Aceh and didn’t want us saying anything about Jesus. I just wanted to help some people. I also wanted a hotel. I wanted a safer place. I didn’t want to die. I had no idea what I was getting into. We took supplies to what was, before the tsunami, a fishing village. It was now a group of people living on the ground, some in tents. I just followed what the rest of our little group was doing. They had more experience. We distributed the food, housewares, cooking oil, that sort of thing, and stayed on the ground with them. That’s how our little disaster-response group operated, even though I wanted a hotel. They stayed among the victims and lived with them. After the militant group threatened to slit our throats, I felt kind of vulnerable out there, lying on the ground. As a dad with two little kids, I didn’t sign up for the martyr thing. I took the threat seriously and wanted to leave. The local imam resisted our presence, too, and this bugged me. “Well, if you hate us, maybe we should leave. It’s a thousand degrees, we’ve got no AC or running water or electricity, and your co-religionists are threatening us. So, yeah. Maybe let’s call it off.” But it wasn’t up to me, and I didn’t have a flight back. As we helped distribute supplies to nearby villages, people repeatedly asked the same question: “Why are you here?” They simply couldn’t understand why we would be there with them. They told us they thought we were enemies. One of the members of our group spent time working in a truck with locals, driving slowly through the devastation, in the sticky humidity, picking up the bodies of their neighbors. They piled them in the back of a truck. It was horrific work. They wore masks, of course, but there’s no covering the smell of death. The locals paused and asked him too: “Why? Why are you here?” He told them it was because he worshiped Jesus, and he was convinced that Jesus would be right there, in the back of the truck with them. He loves them. “But you are our enemy.” “Jesus told us to love our enemies.” The imam eventually warmed up to us, and before we left, he even invited our little group to his home for dinner! We sat in his home, one of the few in the area still standing. He explained through an interpreter that he didn’t trust us at first, because we were Christians. But while other “aid” groups would drive by, throw a box out of a car, and get their pictures taken with the people of his village, our group was different. We slept on the ground. He knew we’d been threatened, he knew we weren’t comfortable, and he knew we didn’t have to be there. But there we were, his supposed enemies, and we would not be offended. We would not be alienated. We were on the ground with his people. His wives peered in from the kitchen, in tears. He passed around a trophy with the photo of a twelve-year-old boy, one of his children. He told us the boy had been lost in the tsunami, and could we please continue to search for him? Was there anything we could do? We were crying too.

You wanted that? But you’re wise. You understand warfare better than any—” “Once!” the goddess said. “Replaced. Sacked. Looted like a trophy and carted off—away from my beloved homeland. I lost so much. I swore I would never forgive. Neither would my children.” She focused more closely on Annabeth. “You are my daughter?” “Yes.” The goddess fished something from the pocket of her shirt—an old-fashioned subway token—and pressed it into Annabeth’s hand. “Follow the Mark of Athena,” the goddess said. “Avenge me.

She gazed up into his face, and he gazed down into hers as if she were a landscape he was inspecting for hidden enemies. Or perhaps hidden wonders. Lost. His voice lowered conspiratorially. "Would you like your hand back?" The right words to say were bobbing around somewhere in the syrup her brain had become; she couldn't quite fish them out. The truth was, at the moment, her hand seemed to rightly belong to him. As though it were a trophy he'd won for snatching arrows out of air.

When a man’s dreams live past the horizon of the sea, his soul dies a little each day he spends upon land and each mile he moves farther inland until ultimately one day he is nothing but a shell, empty and dead inside. Like a shell, you can hear the sound of the ocean if you hold it close enough to your ear and truly listen. In the sound of the ocean, you can find a man’s purpose and in his purpose you will find the meaning of his life. If you love this man, you’ll bring him back to the sea and set him free. If you greedily wish to showcase this man like a trophy on your windowsill, he may shine for you at times. Perhaps even your friends will comment how wonderful he is, but trust that a storm is brewing within. Each one of his stares into the distance is foretelling of a voyage of freedom to come. When this storm ultimately hits, it will take all that you have to survive and more likely than not, you’ll be separated in its gales.