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.

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.

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

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?

Hard writing makes easy reading.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A poet is somebody who has written a poem.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

intellectual hare

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

but she’s as blunt as a splitting maul.” She thinks about that, walking again.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can’t have a by-product unless you’ve had a product first. It’s immoral not to get in and work and get your hands dirty.

There is something in October sets the gipsy blood astir. We must rise and follow her Where from every hill aflame She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

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

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.

saddle.

She is also capable of a noble generosity, and of cramming it down on the head of the recipient like a crown of thorns.

That have I borne, this can I bear also.

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

But Judas, now, sitting at the Last Supper trying to disguise his treachery, with that symbolic cat behind him, he was something else because of his human complexity.

We all hitched our wagons to the highest stars we could find.

As the saying goes, I don’t want his blood on the rug.

destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody.

And my lonely spirit thrills To see the frosty asters like smoke upon the hills?

But the day that had started crooked insisted on going crooked, like a cross-threaded screw.

It is one of Hawthorne’s bosom serpents, rarely noticed because in the bosom it inhabits it can so easily camouflage itself among a crowd of the warmest and most generous sentiments.

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 it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's already been enough of that.

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. Since

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you. 8 Here is one thing that eventually struck me: March 19, 1938, a Saturday.

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.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game. In the next two weeks we spent a few dollars on white paint and dotted swiss, and were settled. The

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.

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.

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 I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

Whatever we thought about art and its relation to life, we knew that the Faulkner motto we had adopted in harder times no longer served. “They kilt us but they ain’t whupped us yit” was no watchword for this world so full of interest, instruction, suggestiveness, possibility,

She sounded tinny and false. Poor lady, she found it as difficult as I did to know how to act or what to say. Later, with practice, we might do better. The star had her part down cold, but the male lead didn't like his lines, and the walk-ons had never seen the script until forty minutes ago.

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

In high school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a bunch of us spent a whole year reading Cicero—De Senectute, on old age; De Amicitia, on friendship. De Senectute, with all its resigned wisdom, I will probably never be capable of living up to or imitating. But De Amicitia I could make a stab at, and could have any time in the last thirty-four years.

I don’t care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

All the little Indians in a half circle around Aunt Emily are getting an imprinting that will last for life. The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world. It will become part of the loved ambience of Battell Pond, a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood. These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.

My feet take me up the road to the gate, and through it. Just inside the gate the road forks. I ignore the Ridge House road and choose instead the narrow dirt road that climbs around the hill to the right. John Wightman, whose cottage sits at the end of it, died fifteen years ago. He will not be up to protest my walking in his ruts. It is a road I have walked hundreds of times, a lovely lost tunnel through the trees, busy this morning with birds and little shy rustling things, my favorite road anywhere.

I wonder if I have ever felt more alive, more competent in my mind and more at ease with myself and my world, than I feel for a few minutes on the shoulder of that known hill while I watch the sun climb powerfully and confidently and see below me the unchanged village, the lake like a pool of mercury, the varying greens of hayfields and meadows and sugarbush and black spruce woods, all of it lifting and warming as the stretched shadows shorten. There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

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.

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. Through friendship, we spark and inspire one another’s ambitions: 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 made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. . . . 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 have difficulty in recognizing those hopeful innocents as ourselves. What justification did Sally have for her faith in me? What justification did I have for faith in myself? Why did all those Ellises and Langs, down to the remotest cousin, take us at our declared value—or more accurately, at the value that Sid and Charity declared for us? I suppose I know. To them we were no very special phenomenon—a young couple on their way up, just starting out. That family expected young people to be reasonably attractive socially, and gifted in some way. They had bred so many kinds of competence and so many examples of distinction that mediocrity would have surprised them more than accomplishment did. And they rather liked the fact that like Lyle Lister we came from nowhere. We corroborated some transcendental faith of theirs that the oversoul roof leaked on all alike.

He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice? Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission? If Time alone makes masterpieces, as Anatole France thought, then great writing is just trial and error tested by time, and if it’s that, then above all it has to be free, it has to flow from the gift, not from outside pressures. The gift is its own justification, and there is no way of telling for sure, short of the appeal to posterity, whether it’s really worth something or whether it’s only the ephemeral expression of a fad or tendency, the articulation of a stereotype.

The road climbs curving out of wet ground thick with cedars, and up onto a plateau meadow where Jersey cows, beautiful as deer, watching them with Juno eyes. Along the trail the ferns are dense, drooping with wet, twenty kinds of them. Again he does not know them (in my experience, ferns are an exclusively feminine expertise), and she tells him: hayscented fern, wood fern, sensitive fern, cinnamon fern, ostrich fern, interrupted fern, Christmas fern, bracken, maidenhair - names that are as pleasant to his ear as the woods smells are to his nose. In the intervals between clumps of spruce, the moss spreads a green carpet, inches thick, feather-soft, with candles of ground pine and the domes of spotted orange mushrooms rising out of it... Those aren't toadstools, Those are mushrooms. Deadly Amanita mushrooms. Ne mangez pas. You know everything that grows here. That's wonderful." Not so wonderful. I grew up here. I grew up in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, too, but I couldn't tell you the name of one thing that grows there. One, maybe Lilacs. You didn't grow up with my mother.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner is definitely one of

Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

Dying’s an important event,” she said. “You can’t rehearse for it. All you can do is try to prepare yourself and others.

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.

—Hallie, you’ve got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don’t understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren’t people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn’t reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I’d be falsifying something I don’t want to falsify

To stay, to keep one’s promises, to fulfill one’s obligations does require courage. But to do it well is truly grace under pressure. It also has something to do with age. It’s impossible not to look back and wonder what would have happened if you had had the wit, or guts, or luck to go in some other direction. Such looking back is not an assault on the present. You might, in fact, call it a howl of rage against the inevitable future.

No, at it, at fate, at the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man:

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

Emily or George Barnwell or Uncle Dwight, absorbed by the root of a beech tree in the village cemetery, incorporated into a beechnut, eaten by a squirrel, dropped as a pellet in a meadow, converted into a milkweed stalk, nibbled and taken in by this butterfly, destined to be carried south on a long, unlikely, interrupted migration, to be picked off by a flycatcher, brought back north in the spring as other flesh, laid in an egg, eaten by a robbing jay and laid as another kind of egg, blown out of a tree in a windstorm, soaked up by the earth, extruded as grass, eaten by a freshening heifer, some of it foreordained to be drunk, as Charity said, by its own descendants with their breakfasts, some of it deposited in cowpads, to melt into the

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 than 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.

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.

He said he understood that I was into a second novel. How did that go? I told him: slow and hard. Good, he said. Hard writing makes easy reading.

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.

Talent...is at least half luck...We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not.

Talent , I tell him is at least half luck. I believe that most people have some degree talent for something. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drop a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low or their obligations too many. Something. We have been lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not.

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

She wants all those children, but one of her reasons is so she won’t have too much time to give to one or two. She thinks children in a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect. Her mother dominated her , she says. They clashed a lot. So she wants six or seven so she won’t make the same mistake her mother made. She thinks neglect is good, so long as it isn’t really neglect, so long as the mother is thinking and planning and guiding and keeping an eye on things.

This that we were entering was our first chance at a life.

Chaos,” he told me

That have I borne

They kilt us but they ain’t whupped us yit

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.