Every print issue of Sporting Classics since its creation in 1981 has featured a special page dedicated to the quotes of sporting literature. Even when he was laying out the inaugural issue, Publisher Duncan Grant knew sportsmen would appreciate the inclusion amid the pages of sporting lore.
That tradition continues today with the September/October 2015 issue. Quotes occupy their own space on the last page in the magazine, a sort of crescendo to the short stories and essays the magazine is world famous for.
Sporting Classics Daily often publishes quotes from Passages, a collection of more than 700 quotes available in the Sporting Classics store, but for the first time SCD is highlighting the quotes that were submitted to the print magazine by readers.
Each of the following quotes were included in the January/February 2015 issue of Sporting Classics. We hope you enjoy this compilation and pay it forward by submitting quotes of your own for future consideration.
“A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”
— Aldo Leopold in the preface to Jim Posewitz’s book, Beyond Fair Chase, the Ethic and Tradition of Hunting, 1994
(Submitted by Duane Harpster of Boulder Junction, Wisconsin)
“The connection between hunter and the outdoors is engrained in the hunter’s soul. We belong to a brotherhood passionate with reverence for the theatre of nature where serenity is found in the songbird’s morning chorus and tranquility drawn from the absence of human noise.”
— Mark Morgan, “What About My Ducks,” 2014
(Submitted by Charles Orndorff of Vincennes, Indiana)
“Really— the writer doesn’t want success . . . He knows he has a short span of life and that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion. He only wants to leave a scratch on the wall —Kilroy was here—that someone a hundreds, or a thousands years later will see.”
— William Faulkner, 1897-1962
(Submitted by Bob Musser of Farwell, Michigan)
“There’s few things more frightening than a gun that goes bang when it shouldn’t, or one that doesn’t go bang when it should.”
— Unidentified SWAT policeman
(Submitted by Jon Osborn of Holland, Michigan)
“Fishing is not a sport I expect ever to exhaust or abandon. It has led me and still leads me into too many delights for that. Yet there are times now when I find myself wondering just what it is I am going out to find, with the familiar tackle, in familiar water at a time made familiar by many past seasons. Is it reasonable to expect some new experience?”
— Roderick Haig-Brown, Fisherman’s Fall, 1975
(Submitted by Louis W. Duncan of Sisters, Oregon)
“If hunting is an ancient, obsolete, and outmoded way to live, then I will lie down on the blessed earth, let the wet moss saturate my body, open my eyes to the heaven beyond those boughs, and shout aloud my gratitude for the gift of birth in a time before hunting vanishes from the realm of human experience.”
— Richard Nelson, Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America, 1998
(Submitted by Jack Zeller of Westmoreland, New Hampshire)
“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.”
— William Butler Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” 1899
(Submitted by Noel Nagle of Houston, Texas)
“Most fishermen swiftly learn that it’s a pretty good rule never to show a favorite spot to any fisherman you wouldn’t trust with your wife.”
— John Voelker (AKA Robert Traver), Voelker’s Pond, 2002
(Submitted by Jon Osborn of Holland, Michigan)
Send us your favorite quotes from sporting literature to editorial@sportingclassics.com. Include the author, title of the book, and the date of publication.
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