Top 35 Rick Bass Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Write every day. Don’t ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing – and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing. Don’t become self-satisfied, don’t stop moving ahead, growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?”

— Rick Bass

2. “My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.”

— Rick Bass

3. “How we fall into grace. You can’t work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.”

— Rick Bass

4. “There are no new stories in nature, only new observers.”

— Rick Bass

5. “The sole purpose of all the other work was just to buy time to be still for a moment and write.”

— Rick Bass

6. “The mountains have always been here, and in them, the bears.”

— Rick Bass

7. “Ive lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once created, or produced, the art of fiction.”

— Rick Bass

8. “There is romantic nonsense these days about the beauty of death, about the terrible end becoming the lovely beginning, and I think that’s wrong, a diminution of the beauty of life. Death is as terrible as birth is wonderful. The laws of physics and nature – not romance – dictate this. It occurs to me that sometimes even nature – raw, silent, solemn, and joyous nature – fears, even if only slightly, rot.”

— Rick Bass

9. “Nature, and the original system that created us, must always remain somehow with us, the bedrock of our movements and actions. What is our duty? To live a life.”

— Rick Bass

10. “The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.”

— Rick Bass

11. “I’ve heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner.”

— Rick Bass

12. “Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.”

— Rick Bass

13. “The Ploughmen is part inspired fever-dream, part adventure story, a lyric parable of not just goodand evil but of the vast and beautiful and often lonely country in-between. Kim Zupan is a wonder.”

— Rick Bass

14. “The natural world is the only one we have. To try to not see the natural world – to put on blinders and avoid seeing it – would for me seem like a form of madness. I’m also interested in the way landscape shapes individuals and populations, and from that, cultures.”

— Rick Bass

15. “There’s the slightly intoxicating feeling that accompanies the largest blizzards – the realization that there’s a chance, increasing by every second, that you are about to be trapped by beauty.”

— Rick Bass

16. “To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one’s life.”

— Rick Bass

17. “There are none among us who have not been, even for a moment, cruel to those whom we love most, as if unable, in that moment, to shoulder any longer the magnificent weight and burden, the responsibility, of that love.”

— Rick Bass

18. “Live long enough and all weaknesses will be illuminated, but again perhaps that is not all bad for cannot they then begin to become strengths?”

— Rick Bass

19. “When you sign on to be an activist in northwest Montana, people in the grocery store will avoid eye contact, particularly if they’re hanging out with outspoken opponents to your views.”

— Rick Bass

20. “Ceremony. When we’ve lost that, we’ve lost everything, and are only wandering in the dark, like chickens or lambs waiting for eagles.”

— Rick Bass

21. “Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction – more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.”

— Rick Bass

22. “We try and map boundaries, and to string fence – we try to set up a border between life and death, between man and nature, and complicity versus innocence. But the truth is, there is no complicity, there is no innocence; and there is no death, there is only life.”

— Rick Bass

23. “Sometimes I imagine I can feel the earth pause in its rotation, can feel it pause and look at us as if wondering, Just who the hell do you think you are?”

— Rick Bass

24. “The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery – a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man’s knowledge.”

— Rick Bass

25. “Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?”

— Rick Bass

26. “A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.”

— Rick Bass

27. “I do believe that clean air, clean water, and wild mountains and old forests are our birthrights; that a wild and healthy landscape is, or should be, a constitutional right, a freedom, to be protected and celebrated. And as with any right, there is an attendant responsibility.”

— Rick Bass

28. “His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes.”

— Rick Bass

29. “I don’t think I’m a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I’ve been working on it a long time, and it’s not getting much better.”

— Rick Bass

30. “I think a novelist must be more tender with living or ‘real’ people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.”

— Rick Bass

31. “Even the largest of my dreams and ambitions, I realize with increasing dismay, were puny, measly, compared to the object of my dreaming. I would not say my life to date has been built overmuch of compromise, but still, it surrounds me.”

— Rick Bass

32. “I think the idea of holing up and hunkering down against the larger forces of the world has not lost its allure since Thoreau’s time. If anything that instinct, or impulse, continues to reside in almost all of us, sometimes activated or bestirred and other times dormant but always present.”

— Rick Bass

33. “The thing about nature is that each species does what it’s best at. That’s why it’s all so locked together. I’m certain that at its center is some kind of peace or unity or harmony – the white light people speak of having when they come back from “the dead.” And what does our species do best? We construct artificial systems wherein we are mighty predators, or mighty thinkers, or sagacious, benevolent rulers of the universe – allies with God even.”

— Rick Bass

34. “Is it odd to picnic at one’s mother’s grave? To sit up on the cliff and trickle pebbles over the ledge and listen to them bounce until they disappear? To eat an apple, to feel the sun, and to remember her, she who gave so much that it will never diminish? Is it odd to live with ehr in you, to continue to share your days and thoughts with the presence of her loving spirit?”

— Rick Bass

35. “I think even then I knew Omar would be going away, would be leaving the land to explore cities and towns. But still I tried as hard as I could-it was my job-to plant a sense of the wild within him: something that calls one back into the interior, back into the shadows and safety of a place that still has reverence to it. Within every atom of it.”

— Rick Bass

36. “I love the past so much because I love the present. I know I have to go into the world and become shaped, altered, bent, myself-individuated-and that there will be pain and joy in the process. I am not the land itself, neither am I a clone of my family. But the magnitude of my attachment to these things-and the stability it affords-staggers me.”

— Rick Bass

37. “I had eight years with her to remember-she didn’t all go away. A lot of her is still here. Perhaps all. I still don’t know entirely which part of her is her, and which of her is me. Sometimes I’ll see or hear something with a strange kind of resonance and can only assume it is a thing, a scent or sound or sight, similar or maybe even identical to one which once touched her deeply, and I will pause, pondering the meaning of this response.”

— Rick Bass