Top 15 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Monninger

I live in a beautiful part of the world - western New Hampshire along the Baker River - and my family and I spend a lot of time outdoors.

Bears are extremely human, even down to their footprints. But I am also a fly fisherman, so I have fished beside brown bears in Alaska and was once charged by a black bear. I love bears.

I'd love to do more woodworking, and maybe will someday, but I wasn't brought up in that environment. My wife is better at woodworking, and most around-the-house skills, than I am.

When a trout rises to a fly, it does not swim as much as tilt its fins and jet skyward.

Fishing the small streams of New Hampshire is a pastime that combines hiking, map reading, and bushwhacking - plenty of it.

I once owned a home on an island off the coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Biologists have determined brookies to be indicators of ecosystem health and have been recently campaigning to get the word out. If brookies inhabit a stream, the odds are good that the waterway is in excellent condition.

I've never liked the moment of seeing something beautiful - a sunset, a moose, an elephant - and then raising a camera and trying to capture it for some future moment. That's always struck me as strange.

I actually believe in simplicity as a way of life. My wife and I are considering moving into a yurt!

I usually fish a Hornberg or a Muddler Minnow, a deer-haired streamer that comes in a variety of sizes and colors but replicates a sculpin minnow or a grasshopper. Even if a trout doesn't take the larger streamers, it can usually be counted on to come up and give a look, revealing its location.

As someone who has moved around a fair amount, I wondered what it would be like to stay rooted to one place, one community.

I've taken a mail packet boat along the southern Newfoundland coast and spent some time on St. Pierre and Miquelon watching the seal colonies. I like pine trees. I like cold rivers.

I learned to look up suddenly from a hatch or feeding frenzy and find myself momentarily removed from solid earth. I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself

I am almost certain fishermen posess a peculiar bend to their makeup. Fisherman are optimists, and the fish in the future is always preferable to the fish at hand. Even the best fishermen catch fish only a small percentage of the time, which means we persevere in a sport that features failure as its main ingredient. Truly great days, when the fish hammer the fly as soon as it lands on the water are rare.

I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself.