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d145720
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Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.
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civilization
heartbeat
poetry
rocky-mountains
rough
roughness
west
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Wallace Stegner |
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df2eb3c
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He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.
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Wallace Stegner |
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8fc7949
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When we're young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old.
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Wallace Stegner |
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6114d6a
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As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.
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Wallace Stegner |
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8412dd2
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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 ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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3c2202e
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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5db5f43
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A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.
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Wallace Stegner |
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0978c6c
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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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past
relationships
research
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Wallace Stegner |
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4f0257f
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His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.
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Wallace Stegner |
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817b6b6
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If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.
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human-life
immeasurability
organic
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Wallace Stegner |
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a3f13ca
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I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten.
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Wallace Stegner |
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80b5de9
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I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or..
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emptiness
evil
habit
habits
old-age
work
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Wallace Stegner |
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936cefd
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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 |
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7475a59
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Nevertheless, no fictions.
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Wallace Stegner |
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22a7935
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In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up.
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Wallace Stegner |
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b317808
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Maybe we were the Diggers of literature.
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Wallace Stegner |
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1fcb892
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She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls.
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Wallace Stegner |
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667c927
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You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? 'Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published?
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Wallace Stegner |
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c5cc99f
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When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold.
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Wallace Stegner |
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29e45d8
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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14eb77b
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The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing--animals as a rule, men if necessary.
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Wallace Stegner |
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b7e7ce6
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She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.
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Wallace Stegner |
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7b6f0a3
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What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain.
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Wallace Stegner |
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f6f9fa3
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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5ec9abe
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Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability.
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Wallace Stegner |
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eacb98d
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Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they (I mustn't.)
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Wallace Stegner |
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d95af1f
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If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.
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Wallace Stegner |
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2ba62eb
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We're all tougher than we think we are. We're fixed so that almost anything heals.
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Wallace Stegner |
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5faf078
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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 pinon and junipers when the tapping came on the door.
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Wallace Stegner |
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7a88aac
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It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary. I can't see anything wrong with any of that.' 'Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be inhabited by and surrounded by members of the human race.
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crowds
humanity
idealism
individuality
privacy
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Wallace Stegner |
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3070ba2
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What should one do? If Ruth had any better luck with him I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms...She followed him to the bottom of his burrow, trying to understand, she forgave him incessantly, she was the pacifying force when he and I clashed. And he went out of his way to treat her with even greater impatience and contempt than he treated me. His wretc..
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Wallace Stegner |
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2a2ad79
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How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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d6d629d
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He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.
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Wallace Stegner |
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76aba57
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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030488c
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A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.
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Wallace Stegner |
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cd30614
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I have always said that the way to deal with the pain of other's is by sympathy, which is suffering with, and that the way to deal with one's own pain is to put one foot after the other. Yet I was never willing to suffer with others, and when my own pain hit me, I crawled into hole. Sympathy I have failed in, stoicism I have barely passed. But I have made straight A's in irony- that curse, that evasion, that armor, that way of staying safe ..
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humanity
life
pain
suffering
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Wallace Stegner |
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0f1423c
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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 ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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9c1d7f4
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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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nostalgia
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Wallace Stegner |
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92f6a64
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We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again.
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Wallace Stegner |
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ff7850e
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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 ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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b95c903
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It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.
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patience
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Wallace Stegner |
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8f17b42
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The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of peopl..
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Wallace Stegner |
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d2d3af4
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Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.
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Wallace Stegner |
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dd7d393
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |