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2685b1e
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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 |
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6d6b3df
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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 sa..
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Wallace Stegner |
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16c7a3b
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As the country at large grows more stressful as a dwelling place, the quiet, remoteness, and solitude of a week on a wild river become more and more precious to more and more people.
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Wallace Stegner |
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a3486f4
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Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they've got.
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Wallace Stegner |
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553a319
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Literature is a function of temperament, and thank God there are many kinds of temperament and therefore many kinds of literature. I can speak only for my own, and after considerable acquaintance I have determined that my temperament is quiet, recessive, skeptical, and watchful. I don't like big noisy scenes, in fiction or in life. I avoid riots and mass meetings. It would embarrass me to chase fire engines. I have a hard enough time making..
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Wallace Stegner |
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7f16603
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and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility. But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve?
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Wallace Stegner |
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9978dbf
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Es lasst sich wohl kaum abstreiten... dass die Vorstellung von einem freien, ungebundenen Leben uns seit jeher berauscht und beflugelt hat. In unserer Gedankenwelt verbinden wir damit die Flucht vor der Last der Geschichte, vor Unterdruckung, dem Gesetz und lastigen Verpflichtungen. Wir sehen uns nach der absoluten Freiheit, und der Weg dorthin fuhrte schon immer gen Westen.
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Wallace Stegner |
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e709781
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No place is a place until it has found its poet.
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Wallace Stegner |
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30fad1f
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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, m..
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drive
motivational
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Wallace Stegner |
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95906b4
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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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obsession
past
writing
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Wallace Stegner |
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b157b1f
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There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.
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Wallace Stegner |
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80786b2
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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 watercourses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for t..
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mountains
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Wallace Stegner |
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9a06634
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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 |
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ab390e9
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And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the lazy, the insensitive, or the imitative. It is for the creative, and creativity implies both talent and hard work.
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Wallace Stegner |
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4151069
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This place is like the back entrance to a black cow.
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Wallace Stegner |
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05ad7dc
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Where you find the greatest good, there you will also find greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does. What makes the best environment for Clematis armandi makes a lovely home for leaf hoppers. A place where Joe Allston hopes to enjoy his retirement turns out to be Tom Weld's ancestral acres and a place attractive to Caliban.
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Wallace Stegner |
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2ced2a0
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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 questio..
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Wallace Stegner |
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f4f2108
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And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?
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Wallace Stegner |
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9ff3c01
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When she stopped short just at the lower line of the apple tress, and stood for a moment with her face lifted, I chalked one up in her favor. I had stopped my chair at the 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 |
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c77fef2
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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.
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Wallace Stegner |
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224109a
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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, Chris..
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Wallace Stegner Crossing To Safety |
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80740a9
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Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother's gentleness and resilience, his father's enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.
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manhood
masculine
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Wallace Stegner |
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c13b3c2
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He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man
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Wallace Stegner |
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703bc08
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And so this is the long road the nation traveled to get to Earthday, 1970, and beyond. Those who lead us down it... did not leave us a bad legacy considering the mood in which the continent was settled, and the amount we had to learn, we can be grateful that those battles do not have to be fought, at least not on the same fields, again. We can be just as certain that others will have to be. Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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626d04f
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Poems ought to reflect the the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.
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work
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Wallace Stegner |
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e727eec
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Closing up the canyon camp was like closing up a house after a death. ("It is easier to die than to move," she wrote Augusta once; "at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.")"
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Wallace Stegner |
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3a4f16c
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The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can't look upon them as just life, impartial and eternal and in flux, an unceasing interchange of protein. And I can't find proofs of the crawl toward perfection that she believed in. Maybe what we call evil is only as she told me that first day we met, what conflicts with our interests; ..
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good-vs-evil
humanity
life
nature
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Wallace Stegner |
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2ff55b9
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Marian's eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. "Now you see? You wondered what was in whale's milk. Don't you know now? The same thing that's in a mushroom spore so small you need a microscope to see it, or in gophers, or poison oak, or anything else we try to pave under or grub out, or poison. There isn't good life and bad life, there's only life. Think of the force down the..
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biology
birth
humanity
life
nature
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Wallace Stegner |
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70f9aaa
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Isn't it complicated to be human, though?" she said. "Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally...And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn't make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance..." "The one thing," Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small an..
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death
grief
humanity
loss
love
suffering
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Wallace Stegner |
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2794cc2
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intellectual hare
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Wallace Stegner |
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44a7885
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I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.
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Wallace Stegner |
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7400d2b
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I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.
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Wallace Stegner |
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7157270
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The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.
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Wallace Stegner |
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7f5a5ae
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Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone.
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home
loss
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Wallace Stegner |
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b5f93e3
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If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferable "comic," of foreplay, lubrication, penetration, and climax and in deference to the accepted opinions about Victorian love, I would have to abort the climax and end the wedding night in tears and desolate comfortings. But I don't know. I have a good deal of..
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Wallace Stegner |
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1707787
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We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.
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Wallace Stegner |
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4977d73
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So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy?
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Wallace Stegner |
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6128407
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the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?
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genealogy
mankind
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Wallace Stegner |
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faf6515
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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 becomes a game.
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Wallace Stegner |
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d6fb60e
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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."
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Wallace Stegner |
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5bb0d37
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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 ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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9469d09
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For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.
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Wallace Stegner |
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bdf0358
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A daughter at home resting up from her husband--who is apparently a head of some sort, one of the Berkeley Street People, a People's Park maker, a drop-out and a cop-out whose aim is to remake the world closer to the heart's desire. I know him, I have seen him a hundred times--his mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. He brings his dog to classes, or did when he was attending classes. He eats organically grown vegetables and ..
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Wallace Stegner |
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929423b
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Accident, they say, favors the prepared mind. Opportunity knocks only for those who are ready at the door. If we believe the novels we read, upward mobility is always ambitious, hungry, and aggressive, or at the very least, discontented. The George Willards are forever yearning away from the spiritual starvation of Winesburg toward some vague larger life. But that is not always the way it is. Some of us didn't know enough to be discontented..
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Wallace Stegner |