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Top Rick Bass Quotes

Browse top 28 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Rick Bass.

Favorite Rick Bass Quotes

1. "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
2. "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 If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing—and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing.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
3. "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
4. "[Wild animals], and the beautiful landscapes that sustain them...possess a value and a virtue regardless of our dwindling connection with them. It seems that there is a virtue and a wisdom in keeping some things beyond our reach: that the protection of wilderness itself is imperative... We have touched, and are consuming, everything. The world is very old, and we are so new. I like the feeling of awe--what the late writer Wallace Stegner called 'the birth of awe'--in beholding wild country not reduced by man. I like to remember that it is wild country that gives rise to wild animals; and that the marvelous specificity of wild animals reminds us to wake up, to let our senses be inflamed by every scent and sound and sight and taste and touch of the world. I like to remember that we are not here forever, and not here alone, and that the respect with which we behold the wild world matters, if anything does." ~ Rick Bass
5. "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
6. "It is a kind of church, back in these last cores. It may not be your church -- this last one percent of the West – but it is mine, and I am asking unashamedly to be allowed to continue worshipping the miracle of the planet, and the worship of a natural system not yet touched, never touched by the machines of man. A place with the residue of God – the scent, feel, sight, taste, and sound of God – forever fresh upon it" ~ Rick Bass
7. "His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes." ~ Rick Bass
8. "There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been." ~ Rick Bass
9. "Slater used to be a poet, he's nothing now, and he sort of looks on Robby and me with awe because we aren't nothing yet, we haven't given up yet, awed at me because I'm thirty-one and haven't given up yet, and at Robby because he's young and has potential. Most people stop wanting to be a writer around the age of sixteen." ~ Rick Bass
10. "..everyone has to do one really bad thing in life to call their life a life." ~ Rick Bass
11. "When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd's mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy's face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he'd ridden by the day's end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd - a phantasmagoric burning blue circuitry. The cracking of the cowboy's whips and the twitching of the cattle's tails also emitted sparkling "snakes of fire." ~ Rick Bass
12. "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" ~ Rick Bass
13. "-is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?" ~ Rick Bass
14. "You can't manufacture love: you can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then you hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assaults of time." ~ Rick Bass
15. "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
16. "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
17. "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
18. "I do not concern myself with my inability to feel such comfort amidst humans (other than with very few friends and family), but, rather, am simply thankful that at least dogs exist, and I'm humbly aware of how much less a person I'd be – how less a human – if they did not exist." ~ Rick Bass
19. "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
20. "A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good." ~ Rick Bass
21. "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
22. "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
23. "Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds." ~ Rick Bass
24. "I've lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once 'created,' or produced, the art of fiction." ~ Rick Bass
25. "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
26. "To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one's life." ~ Rick Bass
27. "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
28. "Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith." ~ Rick Bass

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Today's Quote

True faith is never found alone; it is always accompanied by expectation. The man who believes the promises of God expects to see them fulfilled. Where there is no expectation, there is no faith."
Author: A.W. Tozer

What Did Rick Bass Talk About?

Wit
Thin
Here
Per
Hen
Con
Win
Self
Act
Cent
Era
End
Bee
Ear
Ring
Round
City
Fire
Each
May
Lit
Lie
Less
Late
Hey
King

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