RICK BASS

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Sometimes I perceive that there is a stillness and a wholeness in the world or in some portion or corner or fragment of the world or some little place in time where things just feel so right and huge and powerful and easy that I will have the perhaps blasphemous thought maybe there are layers of heaven.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

The future's so random, and so mobile, there's no way you're going to get to your vision of what you want your community to be just by chance alone. I really believe you have to let people know, to use your voice, to say, 'this is what I like about my place, I want to keep it this way, this is what I think can be improved, this is what I disapprove of.' That's the only way you can have a part in shaping the future.

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.

If it's wild to your own heart, protect it. Preserve it. Love it. And fight for it, and dedicate yourself to it, whether it's a mountain range, your wife, your husband, or even (god forbid) your job. It doesn't matter if it's wild to anyone else: if it's what makes your heart sing, if it's what makes your days soar like a hawk in the summertime, then focus on it. Because for sure, it's wild, and if it's wild, it'll mean you're still free. No matter where you are.

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'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.

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

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.

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.