The important stuff:
Also, I wish I had written the following:
I find it impossible to speak about fishing at all without using the word "hope", beacuse angling fits into a category of human experience that is rooted more in expectation and possibility than in some kind of achievement or fulfillment. Things like courtship, artistic creation, religion, and fly fishing (which is more than incidentally related to each of these) seem to me of a piece. All of them presume goals, of course --mariage, artifact, salvation and trout -- which certainly shape the enterprise, but they don't necessarily define its meaning or the source of its enjoyment. Quite the contrary -- the significance of the whole experience and much of our pleasure in participation in it, stems precisely from the prospect of not attaining the object. Lovers, poets, religious madmen, and anglers seem to me to have this in common -- they live for impassioned anticipation of an uncertain thing.But I didn't.. Ted Leeson did, in his wonderful book The Habit of Rivers, Reflections on Trout Streams and Fly Fishing.
That's pretty much it.