The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness
Rick Bass
Top 10 Best 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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?”
“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 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.”
“Ceremony. When we've lost that, we've lost everything, and are only wandering in the dark, like chickens or lambs waiting for eagles.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
eternity, life, mother, extinction, loneliness, siblings, nature, family-bond, mom, death, remembering, granddaughter, humanity, dying, the-universe, ceremony, grandfather, nature-appreciation, family, nature-of-man
