The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness Quotes

“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, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“Grandfather died a few days after his hundredth birthday. Both Father and I were there at the end, in the room where I'd been born, forty-four years ago. It was not unlike that day, with sunlight streaming through the windows, and hummingbirds hovering outside, iridescent sun-glittering flashes of jewels. A dove was calling, back in the cool shade. Grandfather's hand was cool, as cool as the river. He tried to sit up to look out at the sunlight.

"Sycamores grow by running water," he sang, "cottonwoods by still water," and then he died, and I felt a century slip away.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“I knew that I was losing him, and yet we all had the courage to draw closer, to weave tighter, even all the way into the end.

Fred worked in the study, under the glow of yellow light, like an angel-we could see him in there, through the glass doors-while the rest of us sat or lay on the patio under the sky and the stars. Sometimes Grandfather would reach down, searching for my hand, find it, and squeeze it. The last bloodline of my mother, I would think, holding his hand-my last, strongest blood-connection to her-and perhaps he was thinking the same, at those times.

Father and Omar intent upon the game. Grandfather and I intent upon eternity.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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?”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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?”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“Hawk-soar, and butterflies - water trickling, and especially the night sounds: owls, and fish splashing in the creek, the invisible sound of bats over the water, and the howls of the coyotes, the silence of the stars, the sound of the wind, the cool wind: both howling blue northers in the winter, and cool southerly prairie-scented night breezes coming up from Mexico in the summer, cooling the land and bathing us in blossom scents-huisache, agarita. Fire-flies,drawing light it seemed (and blinking it through their bodies) as if fueled by the presence of joy, or happiness, somewhere in the world, and that energy has, and still is, on Prade Ranch”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“I had eight years with her to remember-she didn't all go away. A lot of her is still here. Perhaps all. I still don't know entirely which part of her is her, and which of her is me. Sometimes I'll see or hear something with a strange kind of resonance and can only assume it is a thing, a scent or sound or sight, similar or maybe even identical to one which once touched her deeply, and I will pause, pondering the meaning of this response.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“His beautiful silver hair had turned snow white over the course of just a few days following Chubb's death, and in a way this made him seem younger: made him seem to fit the white caliche landscape even better, and blend in.

His skin was turning whiter, too, even after he had been out in the sun,

It was beautiful, watching him get old-ancient-now that I had realized he too was going to die. This time I could understand it. It was like watching some graceful diver plunge in slow motion-the slowest-from the top of an improbably high cliff, down to the cool river below.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“I remember a game Omar and I used to play, when we were small. Scorpions would glow in the dark, after we'd loaded them up with light by shining our flashlight on them. Not every scorpion would glow like this, but some would-about one in a hundred, maybe one in a thousand. We'd lift up rocks, under the moonlight, and shine our lights on the scorpions' backs, looking for such a specimen. And then when we'd find one, we'd fill him with the light from our flashlights, then shut the lights off and follow him, glowing in the dark, across the caliche streambeds, across the slick rock, and across the hills, following him until the glimmer faded, and there was only silence.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“They're old letters from this fellow Chubb and I used to know," he sang, almost in a whisper, and I imagined that the birds, if they could hear him, rustled in their sleep, on their roosts: his words entering their dreams, calling to them.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“In four more years, after Grandfather died, Father would move to Fredericksburg and start a garden: not yet tired of living, but tired, I knew, of wondering what he had missed.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“It is a gradual kind of strengthening. It takes a long time to see how the losses build you up, rather than strip you down and wear you away.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“The way he learned to sing was by imitating the songbirds: their warbles and whistles, their scolds. Before his stroke he'd been able to imitate certain notes and melodies of their calls, but never whole songs.

I was sitting under the umbrella with him, in early March-March second, the day the Texas Declaration of Independence had been signed, when Grandfather began to sing. A black-and-white warbler had flown in right in front of us and was sitting on a cedar limb, singing-relieved, I think, that we weren't owls. Cedar waxwings moved through the brush behind it, pausing to wipe the bug juice from their bills by rubbing their beaks against branches (like men dabbing their mouths with napkins after getting up from the table). Towhees were hopping all around us, scratching through the cedar duff for pill bugs, pecking, pecking, pecking, and still the vireo stayed right there on that branch, turning its head sideways at us and singing, and Grandfather made one deep sound in his throat-like a stone being rolled away-and then he began to sing back to the bird, not just imitating the warbler's call, but singing a whole warbler song, making up warbler sentences, warbler declarations.

Other warblers came in from out of the brush and surrounded us, and still Grandfather kept whistling and trilling. More birds flew in. Grandfather sang to them, too. With high little sounds in his throat, he called in the mourning doves and the little Inca doves that were starting to move into this country, from the south, and whose call I liked very much, a slightly younger, faster call that seemed to complement the eternity-becking coo of the mourning dove.

Grandfather sang until dark, until the birds stopped answering his songs and instead went back into the brush to go to roost, and the fireflies began to drift out of the bushes like sparks and the coyotes began to howl and yip. Grandfather had long ago finished all the tea, sipping it between birdsongs to keep his voice fresh, and now he was tired, too tired to even fold the umbrella.
....
I was afraid that with the miracle of birdsong, it was Grandfather's last night on earth-that the stars and the birds and the forest had granted him one last gift-and so I drove slowly, wanting to remember the taste, smell, and feel of all of it it, and to never forget it. But when I stopped the truck he seemed rested, and was in a hurry to get out and go join Father, who was sitting on the porch in the dark listening to one of the spring-training baseball games on the radio.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“Did he know he was going to die?" I asked, and Grandfather looked at me in surprise-his little granddaughter again.

"He was eight-seven," he said in his stroke language. Grandfather studied my face carefully then, missing nothing. He watched my face the way he would have watched the cedars for a songbird he was trying to lure in with his screech owl calls. I was the young woman who would be burying him. He was trying to have it both-the afterlife and the here. His face was as curious as a young boy's.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“farther west, a raven floated down the road like an escort, a companion, making sure I got home all right.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“I sat in the back with Omar napping against my right shoulder and Mother napping against my left, and I thumbed through the bird book and looked at pictures of all the new birds I had seen, and at the ones I had not seen. It was unimaginable to think that they were out there-all these hundreds, even thousands of birds-and that I had not seen them. I felt both hungry and sated-like a cat, I imagined. With Mother asleep on my shoulder, good crisp air coming in the window, a stomach full of flounder, and two dozen new birds flying through my mind-and returning home-I felt like there couldn't be a more satisfied person in the world.

This, in turn, made me hungrier: made me want to see more.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“I remember one of the last things Mother said to us, one of the very last things. In my mind, it has become the last thing, and maybe it was.

She was lying on the cedar frame bed in the back bed-room in the early summer, with the bed moved over right against the window. The window was open to let the breeze and birdsong and sunlight in, the light rushing in through the lace curtains. She had lost a lot of weight and had had a hard time, but was never more beautiful in the way that there can be nothing more beautiful than dignity.

"I've seen a lot," she said, and smiled, and it was not an act for us, it was not a thing said for our benefit. She was just saying it, and smiling. She was just brave, was all.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness

“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.”
― Rick Bass, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness