Wallace Stegner

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

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__ look upon them as just life, impartial and eternal and in flux, an unceasing interchange of protein. And I can__ 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; but maybe there are such realities as ignorance, selfishness, jealousy, malice, criminal carelessness, and maybe these things are evil no mater whose interests they serve or conflict with.

Isn__ it complicated to be human, though?_ she said. __nimals 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__ make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance_ __he one thing,_ Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, __he thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won__ ever see her grow up. She__l have to do it without whatever I could have given her._ __ime, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It__ so important to us because we see it so close. We__e individuals, we__e full of ourselves, and so we__e bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there__ so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we__ always been and always intended to be_do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there__ so much to feel and I__ greedy?

I have always said that the way to deal with the pain of other__ is by sympathy, which is suffering with, and that the way to deal with one__ 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__ in irony- that curse, that evasion, that armor, that way of staying safe while seeming wise. 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 other__. to hide from anything. That was Marian__ text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

Marian__ eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. __ow you see? You wondered what was in whale__ milk. Don__ you know now? The same thing that__ 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__ good life and bad life, there__ only life. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born!

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.

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

[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.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

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.

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.

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.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he__ far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can__ afford self-doubt and he can__ let other people__ opinions, even a father__, keep him from writing.