Angle Of Repose Quotes

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue.

His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.

A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

It happens that I despise that locution, "having sex," which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than fucking.

Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.

It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning.

We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again.

What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.

As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept.

Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.

I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten.

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.

The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. those I don't have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.

Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.

There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do.

I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were -- inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.

A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.

When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold.

[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.

In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then chewing it all over until it was soft.

There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.

In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up.

The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. Those I don’t have, but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.

What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.

For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.

Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.

So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy?

Actually he never expected much of people, and so he wasn’t upset if they turned out to be shysters or chiselers or crooks. But a few people he trusted absolutely. It was when they betrayed him that he turned to rock.

If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours.

I’m not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I’ve written enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?' Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually — I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.

She has the sort of body you go to see in marble. She has golden hair. Quickly, deftly, she reaches with both hands behind her back and unclasps her top. Setting it on her lap, she swivels ninety degrees to face the towboat square. Shoulders back, cheeks high, she holds her pose without retreat. In her ample presentation there is defiance of gravity. There is no angle of repose. She is a siren and these are her songs.

Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong.

It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.

Buenos dias," she said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary. I can't see anything wrong with any of that.' 'Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be inhabited by and surrounded by members of the human race.

I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours.

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.

Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”? I suppose you replied, “By living with an engineer.” But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don’t mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it. There was a time up there in Idaho when everything was wrong; your husband’s career, your marriage, your sense of yourself, your confidence, all came unglued together. Did you come down out of that into some restful 30° angle and live happily ever after?

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

Going up the path she felt that she was crying silently inside, drowning in desolate unshed tears.

Each child marked a decline in the security of their life.

I can stand anything I have to stand!

sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.

The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with watercourses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.

In Antartica, The Wright and half a dozen other valleys in the Central Transantarctic Mountains are collectively referred to as the dry valleys. It has not rained here in two million years. No animal abides, no plant grows. A persistent, sometimes ferocious wind has stripped the country to stone and gravel, to streamers of sand. The huge valleys stand stark as empty fjords. You look in vain for any conventional sign of human history- the vestige of a protective wall, a bit of charcoal, a discarded arrowhead. Nothing. There is no history, until you bore into the layers of rock or until the balls of your fingertips run the rim of a partially exposed fossil. At the height of the austral summer, in December, you smell nothing but the sunbeaten stone. In a silence dense as water, your eye picks up no movement but the sloughing of sand, seeking its angle of repose. On the flight in from New Zealand it had occurred to me, from what I had read and heard, that Antarctica retained Earth’s primitive link, however tenuous, with space, with the void that stretched out to Jupiter and Uranus. At the seabird rookeries of the Canadian Arctic or on the grasslands of the Serengeti, you can feel the vitality of the original creation; in the dry valleys you sense sharply what came before. The Archeozoic is like fresh spoor here.

Summer has weeks left, but once the calendar displays the word “September,” you’d think it was Latin for “evacuate.” I pity them for missing the best weather and the most energized time of year…It’s an extremely impressive display of life at the apogee of summer, the year’s productivity mounded and piled past the angle of repose. It is a world lush with the living, a world that-despite the problems- still has what it takes to really produce.

I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like anarchy, I don't even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don't like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it.

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.

He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage.

He cited me her own remark that she wrote from the protected point of view, the woman’s point of view, as evidence that she went through her life from inexperience to inexperience.

It is not basically a question of the size in repose," I said. "It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.

Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.

It is strange to find ourselves people of consequence.

Closing up the canyon camp was like closing up a house after a death. (“It is easier to die than to move,” she wrote Augusta once; “at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.”)

Home is a notion that only the nations the of homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier? What loss would hurt more?

But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.

The sound of anything coming at you—a train, say, or the future —has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don’t find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn’t I look forward to yours?

When she stopped short just at the lower line of the apple tress, and stood for a moment with her face lifted, I chalked one up in her favor. I had stopped my chair at the exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do.

If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferable "comic," of foreplay, lubrication, penetration, and climax and in deference to the accepted opinions about Victorian love, I would have to abort the climax and end the wedding night in tears and desolate comfortings. But I don't know. I have a good deal of confidence in both Susan Burling and the man she married. I imagine they worked it out without the need of any scientific lubricity and with even less need to make their privacies public.

Early in the anti-Vietnam War movement, Stegner marched with the students, but later, when the demonstrations turned violent, he was revolted and couldn’t understand how breaking all the windows on the Stanford campus could bring an end to the war.

The irony is that the novel with its Pulitzer and its controversy has brought more attention to Mary Hallock Foote than she would ever have received otherwise.

A daughter at home resting up from her husband--who is apparently a head of some sort, one of the Berkeley Street People, a People's Park maker, a drop-out and a cop-out whose aim is to remake the world closer to the heart's desire. I know him, I have seen him a hundred times--his mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. He brings his dog to classes, or did when he was attending classes. He eats organically grown vegetables and lives in communes and admires American Indians and takes his pleasure out of tribal ceremonials and loves the Earth and all its natural products. He thinks you can turn the clock back.

J'ai appris que le monde ne voit pas ce qu'il y a en vous, qu'il se moque complètement des espoirs, des rêves, des chagrins qui reposent cachés sous votre peau et vos os. C'est aussi simple que ça. Mes patients le savent, eux. Il constataient qu'une grande partie de ce qu'ils étaient, de ce qu'ils seraient ou de ce qu'ils pourraient être dépendait de la symétrie de leur ossature, de l'espace entre leurs yeux, de la longueur de leur menton, de leur nez, du fait qu'ils aient ou non un angle naso-frontal idéal ou pas.

There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted bosses.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner; Some Horses: Essays by Thomas McGuane; Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison; Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry; The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy; The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana by Rick Bass; The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich; She Had Some Horses: Poems by Joy Harjo; The Meadow by James Galvin; The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig; The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick; The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists by Gregory Curtis; From the Heart of the Crow Country: The Crow Indians’ Own Stories by Joseph Medicine Crow; The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark

Here's a simple complication: What do I mean when I say the word nature? Even as I build it, my answer shifts. I picture the simultaneously increasing and decreasing heft at the tops of the sand dunes Edward Abbey describes in Desert Solitaire. The instability that is the only stable truth beyond the angle of repose.

angle of repose,” which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling.