Quotes from Rick Bass

Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

I think that this almost made up to Chubb for the time about the nighthawk, and I think it was good for grandfather, too, that it reminded him to never forget again that the heart of it all is mystery, and that 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.

he lay down in the middle of the field in the sun on his back and closed his eyes, and felt wind, sun, the ground below him...The sun confused him, with its warmth, the brightness. He dozed throughout the rest of the afternoon. His life meant something. he was his own man, belonged to no one.

Sara would listen for his plane in the afternoons. It did not make sense, but she could hear it even before the dogs could.

Even up until the final moment of life, bat and moth are linked together forever, through time, and beyond. As a last-gasp evasive maneuver, a fleeing moth will sometimes stop its wingbeats in midflight, thereby ceasing to give off data to the bat's radar. But sometimes the bat will pause, too, so that the moth can't pick up any radar signals-the bat seeming to have disappeared-and for just the briefest of moments they will both hang there, suspended in eternity.

hellbenders. I collected with exuberance and totality, bringing home almost everything I could get my hands on, and releasing them into the assorted outdoor terrariums or aquariums in my back yard (the turtles I let run wild in the yard, like dogs or cats).

I pointed to a red-tailed hawk half a mile above us. I watched the hawk to see if it was Chubb. Strange things happen in the animal world when a loved one dies, that's a fact. They honor our passage with far more reverence than we do theirs.

The rich-soil part, the mystery beneath all those reasons, is that I love it. There is an awareness, an addictive alertness, a super-heightened sensitivity that approaches and then becomes a kind of spirituality.

And it occurred to me by the time I was a teenager that I had become part of the land, every bit as much a part of it as sparrow eggs or thrasher nest, garter snake or oak tree, and that the rest of my life, or anyone's life, would be a gradual learning process, a journey toward fitting into one's home, for those of us lucky enough to still recognize what is home...that which we are a part of, rather than estranged from. And rather than using the word lucky, perhaps I should use the word grace.

Some people say with the wolf kept out, our country lost its wildness. There was room for plant eaters but the woods are not the same as they were. The shadows of the forest are different, the wind is different.

We must participate in this world that has birthed us. We must not sit around in rawhide rocking chairs with our heads sunk in grief, while the waters trickle past. We must join the waters.

I went up to the cliff and sat and felt my heart thumping inside. I breathed the cold air and watched the moon climb higher until it, and all of the country below, was mine again.

farther west, a raven floated down the road like an escort, a companion, making sure I got home all right.

I imagined they had been listening for me, but still had not heard me drive up, which made me realize how old they really were: Grandfather, old beyond his time, and Father, old before his time.

I wondered why, after such a great loss, they ever let us out of their sight. Later I realized that it was their way of fighting that loss, sitting there in the darkness and feeling, vicariously, our hearts running through the night, and through the woods-a way of speaking to the sorrow, and to Mother, too-a way of saying that all had not been for naught, that her children's lives and joy would be irrepressible, because they had come out of her.

I ran with him through the dark sweet-smelling cedars to the stripe of white road, and paused, panting, letting him soak up the light of the moon, letting him inflate with the excitement I felt at being alive.

Omar doesn't have any children, either. I suppose the land is all we will leave behind. In that way it is both our parents and our children. The land grows flowers for me to lay at the feet of Mother's grave, there under the big tree. I cut the flowers with scissors and carry them up there, but I am just a medium, a conduit, for that flow. It is really the land that is doing it.