1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5300
5301
5302
5303
5304
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ab390e9 | 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. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 4151069 | This place is like the back entrance to a black cow. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 05ad7dc | 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. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 2ced2a0 | 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.. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| f7a63e3 | Wallace Stegner was a man who lived under the obligation of trying his best to be a "good man," and his writing was part and parcel of that effort. For him, the individual, insofar as his or her capabilities allow, must not only take charge of his or her own destiny, but take on the responsibility of contributing to the welfare of others in family, community and society." | Jackson J. Benson | ||
| f4f2108 | 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? | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 9ff3c01 | 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. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| c77fef2 | 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. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 224109a | 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.. | Wallace Stegner Crossing To Safety | ||
| 80740a9 | 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. | manhood masculine | Wallace Stegner | |
| c13b3c2 | He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man | Wallace Stegner | ||
| cb4c70b | Wallace Stegner once wrote that the lessons of life amount to scar tissue. | Michael McGarrity | ||
| 703bc08 | 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, .. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 626d04f | Poems ought to reflect the the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization. | work | Wallace Stegner | |
| e727eec | 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.")" | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 3a4f16c | 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; .. | good-vs-evil humanity life nature | Wallace Stegner | |
| 2ff55b9 | 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.. | biology birth humanity life nature | Wallace Stegner | |
| 70f9aaa | 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.. | death grief humanity loss love suffering | Wallace Stegner | |
| 26566a1 | Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. --WALLACE STEGNER, THE SPECTATOR BIRD | Jodi Picoult | ||
| 2794cc2 | intellectual hare | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 44a7885 | I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 7400d2b | I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 7157270 | The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 7f5a5ae | Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone. | home loss | Wallace Stegner | |
| b5f93e3 | 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.. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 1707787 | We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most. | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 4977d73 | 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? | Wallace Stegner | ||
| 6128407 | 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? | genealogy mankind | Wallace Stegner | |
| a095ddb | Their jaws dropped. Mom had been taking the lid off the tub of tonight's dinner--fried chicken. Even she looked stunned. I felt a need to explain. "My eye turned black. I asked Tiffany to cover up the bruising." "Well, she did an outstanding job," Mom said. "Took me three hours," Tiffany said. "I need to get ready to go to the hospital. Have fun at Dave and Bubba's." She left, and I wondered if I should go back upstairs, step into the sho.. | Rachel Hawthorne | ||
| 5937f38 | Don't throw good time after bad work. | Jason Fried | ||
| bd49c1b | What do you call a generic pitch sent out to hundreds of strangers hgoping that one will bite? Spam. | Jason Fried | ||
| b12fd17 | Despite being programmed for etiquette and protocol, C-3PO had a singularly awful sense of diplomacy. | Jason Fry | ||
| e2a57a3 | long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness. | Jason Fried | ||
| 04d3ed6 | Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need. | Jason Fried | ||
| 8d16549 | no one's upset by what you're saying, you're probably not pushing hard enough. (And you're probably boring, too.) | Jason Fried | ||
| 1b4ac38 | Everyone should be encouraged to start his own business, not just some rare breed that self-identifies as entrepreneurs. | Jason Fried | ||
| a33347a | The most important thing is to begin. | Jason Fried | ||
| 3cd1056 | Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work--this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can't be found. Instead, it's just one interruption after another. | Jason Fried | ||
| 9dc42a5 | Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance. | Jason Fried | ||
| 6e6f0bb | Everyone on your team should be connected to your customers--maybe not every day, but at least a few times throughout the year. That's the only way your team is going to feel the hurt your customers are experiencing. It's feeling the hurt that really motivates people to fix the problem. And the flip side is true too: The joy of happy customers or ones who have had a problem solved can also be wildly motivating. So | Jason Fried | ||
| a462e90 | It's entirely your responsibility to make your dreams come true. | Jason Fried | ||
| 9a770df | I made arrangements with Bitaki, a teammate on the soccer team I played with, to go fishing with his brothers, who typically worked the waters off Maiana, the nearest island south of Tarawa. When I mentioned to Sylvia that I was going, she said: "No, you're not." "And what do you mean by 'No, you're not'?" I determined right then that I would go out fishing every week. No, every day. I would become a professional fisherman. I would become s.. | J. Maarten Troost | ||
| 1e9d917 | Fortunately, due to a terrible misunderstanding, I soon found myself working as a consultant to the World Bank. I am not exactly sure what it was that led the World Bank to believe I had any expertise in infrastructure finance. I had never even balanced a checkbook. I hadn't even tried. There is not much reason to balance a checkbook when your checking account rarely tops the three-figure mark. And so, to the Third World countries who had t.. | J. Maarten Troost | ||
| 3d4b2d4 | Look for a wave shaped like an A. . Hmm. I saw and and . I saw the alphabet and the alphabet. I saw . I saw no . Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor move. There is a moment, shortly after one accepts the imminence of one's demise, when it occurs that you could be elsewhere: that if you simply left the house a little later, or lingered over a Mai Tai, you would not be h.. | J. Maarten Troost |