Wallace Stegner Crossing To Safety Quotes

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.

It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?

Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

This early piece of the morning is mine.

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.

We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.

Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.

Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.

Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.

Children from a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect.

We’re all tougher than we think we are. We’re fixed so that almost anything heals.

I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

The clear lesson of New England’s history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event--a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a dinner party.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else — pathway to the stars, maybe. I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without benefit of drugs or orgies, have more fun.

Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees—have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with.

Do what you like to do. It’ll probably turn out to be what you do best.

Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something--forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location.

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first.

Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused.

Be bold, he says. Be brave. Be true to your birthright, what you recognize in your heart.

This time she was writing the guidebook herself, as she went, and its authority could not be challenged or repudiated.

A poet is somebody who has written a poem.

You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.

Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view of earth, but it has a certain distance about it, it is under control, you can see her head going on working behind it.

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie.

Long-continued disability makes some people saintly, some self-pitying, some bitter.

Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.

Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.

Stegner shows us, again and again, that it is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one.

Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls.

I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.

If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability.

The wicked and the unhappy always stole the show because sin and suffering were the most universal human experiences.

We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocket.

I didn’t know myself well, and still don’t. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive.

I was writing up a New Mexico snow-storm, I had it coming down thick and heavy, muffling the roads and mounding on adobe walls and windowsills and whitening the piñon and junipers when the tapping came on the door.

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. When you stand outside a door and push the button, something has to happen. Someone must respond; whatever is inside must be revealed. Questions will be answered, uncertainties or mysteries dispelled. A situation will be started on its way through unknown complications to an unpredictable conclusion. The answer to your summons may be a rush of tearful welcome, a suspicious eye at the crack of the door, a shot through the hardwood, anything. Any pushing of any doorbell button is as rich in dramatic possibility as that scene in Chekhov when, just as the Zemstvo doctor's only child dies of diphtheria and the doctor's wife drops to her knees beside the bed and the doctor, smelling of carbolic, takes an uncertain step backward, the bell sounds sharply in the hall.

He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.

intellectual hare

Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe until she falls.

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our totally undramatic life.

Actually I am pretty pregnant with the news Sid brought me, but glad we have not spread it. The girls look very happy. With their heads bound up in babushkas they might be out of the peasant chorus of a Russian opera. Any minute now we will sing and dance to the balalaika. Charity is tall and striking; Sally smaller, darker, quieter. One dazzles, the other warms. In a couple of hours I will need sympathy, but for now I like being washed by the wind.

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.

You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

This place is like the back entrance to a black cow.

No place is a place until it has found its poet.

If I had kept a journal, I could go back through it and check up on what memory reports plausibly but not necessarily truly. But keeping a journal then would have been like making notes while going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Eventless as our life was, it swept us along. Were we any less a Now Generation that the one that presently claims the title? I wonder. And it may be just as well that I have no diary to remember by. Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe.

A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard's book is Sid's wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here.

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it, but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives it has happened so thoroughly only once.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game.

Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood, Touch of manner, hint of mood . . .” How does it go?

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and

Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match,

Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.

After all, we had been programmed in the same system, stuffed like Strasbourg geese with the best that has been known and said in the world during man's long struggle upward from spontaneity to cliché.

There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? What are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognizable in fiction?

There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According

Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One

Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars. Its edges are piled with hills. Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.

Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something. Talent, I tell him, believing what I say, is at least half luck. It isn’t as if our baby lips were touched with a live coal, and thereafter we lisp in numbers or talk in tongues. We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not. Born to the English language and American opportunity (I say this in 1937, after seven years of depression, but I say it seriously) we are among the incredibly lucky ones.

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?

You’ve got a resilient temperament, Mister Morgan,” Sally said. “I have to compensate for a woman who lives in constant anxiety, depression, and alarm.

But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life. With me it was always to be done in words; Sid too, though with less confidence. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness or frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.

Some of our superiors were indeed men of brains and learning and disinterested goodwill, but some were stuffed shirts, and some incompetents, and some timid souls escaping the fray, and some climbers, and some as bitter and jealous as some of us were at being inadequately appreciated. But still there they were, up in the sunshine above the smoke, a patch-elbowed tweedy elite that we might improve when we joined it, but that we never questioned. Especially during the Depression, when every frog of us was lustful for a lily pad.

What if we had born Bushmen in the Kalahari? What if our parents had been undernourished villagers in Uttar Pradesh, and we faced the problem of commanding the attention of the world on a diet of five hundred calories a day, and in Urdu? What good is an ace if the other cards in your hand are dogs from every town

The people we are talking about are hangovers from a quieter time. They have been able to buy quiet, and distance themselves from industrial ugliness. They live behind university walls part of the year, and in a green garden the rest of it. Their intelligence and their civilized tradition protect them from most of the temptations, indiscretions, vulgarities, and passionate errors that pester and perturb most of us. They fascinate their children because they are so decent, so gracious, so compassionate and understanding and cultivated and well-meaning. They baffle their children because in spite of all they have and are, in spite of being to most eyes an ideal couple, they are remote, unreliable, even harsh. And they have missed something, and show it.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe. I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.