Rick Bass Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Fit in where you don't: make your own space..be different..don't give in. Exist somewhere you're not suppose to, or where you don't want to. Be your own men; do what you want, and don't hurt anybdoy

To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one's life.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?