Wallace Stegner Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Wallace Stegner. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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Wallace Stegner (The Spectator Bird)
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Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
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Wallace Stegner (The Sound of Mountain Water)
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[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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
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Wallace Stegner
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It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.
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Wallace Stegner
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It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.
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Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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Wallace Stegner (The Spectator Bird)
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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.
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Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)
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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
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Wallace Stegner
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[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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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We write to make sense of it all.
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Wallace Stegner
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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)
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Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
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Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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?
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Hard writing makes easy reading.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
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Wallace Stegner (The Sound of Mountain Water)
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The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
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Wallace Stegner (Remembering Laughter)
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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We are fossils in the making.
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Wallace Stegner
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Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
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Wallace Stegner
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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[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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
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Wallace Stegner (Wolf Willow)
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After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?
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Wallace Stegner (On Teaching and Writing Fiction)
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Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics))
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
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Wallace Stegner (On Teaching and Writing Fiction)
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National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
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Wallace Stegner
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.
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Wallace Stegner (The Spectator Bird)
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One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.
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Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .
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Wallace Stegner (The Sound of Mountain Water)
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Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to...You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.
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Wallace Stegner
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There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.
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Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain)
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How do I know what I think till I see what I say?
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Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)
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There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.
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Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)
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It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.
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Wallace Stegner (Mormon Country)
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Children from a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
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Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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 β€” 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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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?
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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 rewardsβ€”the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degreesβ€”have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.
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Wallace Stegner (The Spectator Bird)
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If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.
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Wallace Stegner (The American West as Living Space)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls, also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive.
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Wallace Stegner
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[Wild animals], and the beautiful landscapes that sustain them...possess a value and a virtue regardless of our dwindling connection with them. It seems that there is a virtue and a wisdom in keeping some things beyond our reach: that the protection of wilderness itself is imperative... We have touched, and are consuming, everything. The world is very old, and we are so new. I like the feeling of awe--what the late writer Wallace Stegner called 'the birth of awe'--in beholding wild country not reduced by man. I like to remember that it is wild country that gives rise to wild animals; and that the marvelous specificity of wild animals reminds us to wake up, to let our senses be inflamed by every scent and sound and sight and taste and touch of the world. I like to remember that we are not here forever, and not here alone, and that the respect with which we behold the wild world matters, if anything does.
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Rick Bass
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The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.
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Wallace Stegner (On Teaching and Writing Fiction)
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I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today's luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.
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Wallace Stegner (The Spectator Bird)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities. ... She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort.
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Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain)
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The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that is wasn't created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, have lived in it, known it, died in it--have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.
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Wallace Stegner (Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs)
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The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle. (--from The Spectator Bird)
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Wallace Stegner
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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 β€” 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.
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Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)
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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.
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Wallace Stegner