Wallace Stegner - Angle of Repose (1971)

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Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations 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.

Wallace Stegner
I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue.

Wallace Stegner
You married me... but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

Wallace Stegner
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

Wallace Stegner
I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.

Wallace Stegner
You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

Wallace Stegner
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Wallace Stegner
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Wallace Stegner
The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.

Wallace Stegner
Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

Wallace Stegner
Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.

Wallace Stegner
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

Wallace Stegner
A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

Wallace Stegner
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.

Wallace Stegner
It is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

Wallace Stegner