fish or cut bait

{excerpt}
During a discussion of funeral plans, Jackie was "very well composed," said Gore. She proposed that instead of a standard eulogy, the service include brief remarks with quotes from Jack's speeches and favorite passages from the Bible. She...requested...Ecclesiastes 3:1--8: "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven...." (It would be two more years before "Turn, Turn, Turn," the hit song by The Byrds, would popularize those verses as a call for world peace.)

...Sorensen couldn't help being amused by Jackie's Ecclesiastes request. He remembered when Jack had read the verses to her with the coda, "and a time to fish and a time to cut bait."

----------------- {end Excerpt}
[Grace And Power, by Sally Bedell Smith.
Copyright, 2004. Random
House, New York]

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To every thing
there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born,
and a time to die;
a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak...

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