Angle of Repose Quotes

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“I’m not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I’ve written enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?'

Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually — I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. 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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.
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, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Wisdom is knowing what you can accept.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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 water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...]

My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like anarchy, I don't even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don't like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it.”
― Wallace Stegner , Angle of Repose

“In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then chewing it all over until it was soft.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Actually he never expected much of people, and so he wasn’t upset if they turned out to be shysters or chiselers or crooks. But a few people he trusted absolutely. It was when they betrayed him that he turned to rock.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. 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, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”? I suppose you replied, “By living with an engineer.” But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase 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. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don’t mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it. There was a time up there in Idaho when everything was wrong; your husband’s career, your marriage, your sense of yourself, your confidence, all came unglued together. Did you come down out of that into some restful 30° angle and live happily ever after?”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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 the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose