Top 50 Zane Grey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I need this wild life, this freedom.”

— Zane Grey

2. “I will see this game of life out to its bitter end.”

— Zane Grey

3. “I arise full of eagerness and energy, knowing well what achievement lies ahead of me.”

— Zane Grey

4. “Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant, as the years multiply.”

— Zane Grey

5. “Love of man for woman – love of woman for man. That’s the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.”

— Zane Grey

6. “I hope I have found myself, my work, my happiness – under the light of the western skies.”

— Zane Grey

7. “Never insult seven men when all your packing is a six-shooter.”

— Zane Grey

8. “If I fished only to capture fish, my fishing trips would have ended long ago.”

— Zane Grey

9. “I am tired. My arm aches. My head boils. My feet are cold. But I am not aware of any weakness.”

— Zane Grey

10. “Fishing is a condition of the mind wherein one cannot have a bad time.”

— Zane Grey

11. “Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is.”

— Zane Grey

12. “I am full of fire and passion. I am not ready yet for great concentration and passion.”

— Zane Grey

13. “I love my work but do not know how I write it.”

— Zane Grey

14. “What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death.”

— Zane Grey

15. “Men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.”

— Zane Grey

16. “There was never an angler who lived but that there was a fish capable of taking the conceit out of him.”

— Zane Grey

17. “Recipe For Greatness – To bear up under loss; To fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; To be victor over anger; To smile when tears are close; To resist disease and evil men and base instincts; To hate hate and to love love; To go on when it would seen good to die; To look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be. That is what any man can do, and be great.”

— Zane Grey

18. “With distrust came suspicion and with suspicion came fear, and with fear came hate – and these, in already distorted minds, inflamed a hell.”

— Zane Grey

19. “Far away Tongariro! Green – white thundering Athabasca river of New Zealand! I vowed I would come again down across the Pacific to fish in the swift cold waters of this most beautiful and famous of trout streams. It is something to have striven. It is much to have kept your word.”

— Zane Grey

20. “Socialism reached into her mind, to be rejected. She had never understood it clearly, but it seemed to her a state of mind where dissatisfied men and women wanted to share what harder working or more gifted people possessed.”

— Zane Grey

21. “Where I was raised a woman’s word was law. I ain’t quite outgrowed that yet.”

— Zane Grey

22. “Fishermen, no matter what supreme good fortune befalls them, cannot ever be absolutely satisfied. It is a fundamental weakness of intellect.”

— Zane Grey

23. “Fishing keeps men boys longer than any other pursuit.”

— Zane Grey

24. “I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.”

— Zane Grey

25. “The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.”

— Zane Grey

26. “Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.”

— Zane Grey

27. “A good rule of angling philosophy is not to interfere with any fishermans ways of being happy, unless you want to be hated.”

— Zane Grey

28. “I see so much more than I used to see. The effect has been to depress and sadden and hurt me terribly.”

— Zane Grey

29. “Unhappiness is only a change. Happiness itself is only change. So what does it matter? The great thing is to see life – to understand – to feel – to work – to fight – to endure.”

— Zane Grey

30. “The Indian story has never been written. Maybe I am the man to do it.”

— Zane Grey

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

31. “I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It stimulates and inspires me.”

— Zane Grey

Featured in: Reading Quotes

32. “Shut off your wind, Jack! And you, too, Blaze! I didn’t want you fellows to come here. But as you would come, you’ve got to shut up. This is my business.”

— Zane Grey

33. “Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.”

— Zane Grey

34. “There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.”

— Zane Grey

35. “I must go deeper and even stronger into my treasure mine and stint nothing of time, toil, or torture.”

— Zane Grey

36. “Instinct may not be greater than reason, but it’s a million years older. Don’t fight your instincts so hard. If they were not good the God of Creation would not have given them to you.”

— Zane Grey

37. “Jealousy is an unjust and stifling thing.”

— Zane Grey

38. “These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.”

— Zane Grey

39. “With that they, and many others, left the hall and joined the moving crowd in the street. The night was delightfully cool. Stars shone white in a velvet sky. The dry wind from mountain and desert blew in their faces. Pan.”

— Zane Grey

40. “Work is my salvation. It changes my moods.”

— Zane Grey

41. “Mister Hawe, you come along, not satisfied with ropin.”

— Zane Grey

42. “I did not have one bad spell during writing – an unprecedented record.”

— Zane Grey

43. “What is writing but an expression of my own life?”

— Zane Grey

44. “Instantly a thick blackness seemed to enfold her and silence as of a dead world settled down upon her. Drowsy as she was she could not close her eyes nor refrain from listening. Darkness and silence were tangible things. She felt them. And they seemed suddenly potent with magic charm to still the tumult of her, to sooth and rest, to create thought she had never thought before. Rest was more than selfish indulgence. Loneliness was necessary to gain conciseness of the soul.”

— Zane Grey

45. “Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.”

— Zane Grey

46. “Adam Larey gazed with hard and wondering eyes down the silent current of the red river upon which he meant to drift away into the desert.”

— Zane Grey

47. “Before exulatation had vanished, I felt as if I had been granted a marvellous privilege. Out of the inscrutable waters a beautiful fish had somehow leaped to show me fleetingly the life and spirit of his element.”

— Zane Grey

48. “It was a decent New Year’s, but it took a million officers to make it so.”

— Zane Grey

49. “This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.”

— Zane Grey

50. “An awful sense of her deadness, of her soul-blighting selfishness, began to dawn upon her as something monstrous out of dim, gray obscurity.”

— Zane Grey