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c0ac46a
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We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents..
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build-up
chronology
development
existentialism
family
generation-gap
history
life
modernity
past
present
time
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Wallace Stegner |
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698a57f
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The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. those I don't have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.
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Wallace Stegner |
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866e66f
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There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill.
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Wallace Stegner |
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9c0b07e
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Wisdom is knowing what you can accept.
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Wallace Stegner |
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d952249
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When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.
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Wallace Stegner |
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f44dec1
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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f301a9c
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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1b19d30
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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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nature
noticing
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Wallace Stegner |
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4ee631c
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Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
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Wallace Stegner |
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3890b81
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Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept, accept. What we call evil is only a groping towards good, part of the trial and error by which we move toward the perfected consciousness... God is kind? Life is good? Nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Why the reward she received for living intensely and generously and trying to die with dignity? Why the..
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loss
pain
sorrow
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Wallace Stegner |
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9b58d7a
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She was so old, she would have had to be dated by carbon 14.
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Wallace Stegner |
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01a9e7a
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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 ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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bba40fe
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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 |
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d6ffc63
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Be bold, he says. Be brave. Be true to your birthright, what you recognize in your heart.
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Wallace Stegner |
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5460707
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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.
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pilgrim
reverence
theft
tradition
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Wallace Stegner |
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16d883d
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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 a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else--pathway to the stars, ma..
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Wallace Stegner |
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7cfa117
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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 ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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5842366
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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d899890
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You can't be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.
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Wallace Stegner |
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2ec7af5
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It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
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isolation
resilience
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Wallace Stegner |
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2ca137f
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It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to understand it then, and I have not repudiated it till now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death - the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant.
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Wallace Stegner |
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c77cbee
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I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like c..
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civilization
colonization
commune
crowds
history
human-nature
idealism
noise
privacy
society
study
wild
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Wallace Stegner |
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7c46e2f
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Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.
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peace
rest
uneasiness
wandering
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Wallace Stegner |
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438c13c
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In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then chewing it all over until it was soft.
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Wallace Stegner |
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b2755d2
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To belong to a clan, to a tight group of people allied by blood and loyalties and the mutual ownership of closeted skeletons. To see the family vices and virtues in a dozen avatars instead of in two or three. To know always, whether you were in Little Rock or Menton, that there was one place to which you belonged and to which you would return. To have that rush of sentimental loyalty at the sound of a name, to love and know a single place, ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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fe2fb01
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Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.
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Wallace Stegner |
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c372ea1
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What if I turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.
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learning
looking-back
past
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Wallace Stegner |
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4d1c33f
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That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think."
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exaggeration
metaphors
mythology
writing
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Wallace Stegner |
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8062a93
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she said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye."
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language
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Wallace Stegner |
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71ee411
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What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location.
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Wallace Stegner |
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570dec5
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Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?
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Wallace Stegner |
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442dcdb
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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.
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motivation
poverty
writing
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Wallace Stegner |
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903132d
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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 |
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ab77c88
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A poet is somebody who has written a poem.
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poet
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Wallace Stegner |
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efc7e7f
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Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product .
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Wallace Stegner |
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8dc2158
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Perceptions trained in another climate and another landscape have had to be modified. That means we have had to learn to quit depending on perceptual habit. Our first and hardest adaptation was to learn all over again how to see. Our second was to learn to like the new forms and colors and light and scale when we had learned to see them. Our third was to develop new techniques, a new palette, to communicate them. And our fourth, unfortunate..
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Wallace Stegner |
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093db34
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The Cypress Hills massacre,...one of the final outrages of the literally lawless West...came...along that practical and symbolic divide, between the Canadian system of monopoly trading and the American system of competition, whiskey, bullets, exploitation, and extermination.
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Wallace Stegner |
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85cc30d
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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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reading-motivation
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Wallace Stegner |
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cef7f0e
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I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.
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convention
culture
grandparents
progress
tribalism
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Wallace Stegner |
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6e3a78b
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In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.
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memory
public-history
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Wallace Stegner |
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aab642c
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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7327d03
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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Wallace Stegner |
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cbb511b
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I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don't think too much of it was holier-than-thou. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn't agree with a single value that I held.
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Wallace Stegner |
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7714f96
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I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption. His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both.
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Wallace Stegner |