Angle of Repose Quotes

“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

“His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“[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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.”
― 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

“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

“Buenos dias," she said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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, Angle of Repose

“I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“The sound of anything coming at you—a train, say, or the future —has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But 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

“But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Each child marked a decline in the security of their life.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Going up the path she felt that she was crying silently inside, drowning in desolate unshed tears.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“I can stand anything I have to stand!”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Home is a notion that only the nations the of homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier? What loss would hurt more?”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“It is strange to find ourselves people of consequence.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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 confidence in both Susan Burling and the man she married. I imagine they worked it out without the need of any scientific lubricity and with even less need to make their privacies public.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“He cited me her own remark that she wrote from the protected point of view, the woman’s point of view, as evidence that she went through her life from inexperience to inexperience.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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, Angle of Repose

“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, Angle of Repose

“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 lives in communes and admires American Indians and takes his pleasure out of tribal ceremonials and loves the Earth and all its natural products. He thinks you can turn the clock back.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Morning, the room full of sun. I wheel to the window and watch the robins digging worms in Grandfather's lawn. The grass is blue-wet in the open, green-dry under the pines. 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

“In the hour of their disspiritedness, the haggard face and form that drooped and fainted were authentic enough They had worked hard and hoped hard, and their disappointment was as great as their expectations had been. But the money movtie demeans the. They were in no race for wealth - that was precisely what disgusted Grandfather with the mining business. They were makers and doers, they wanted to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for a civilization. I suppose they were wrong - their whole civilization was wrong - but they were the antithesis of mean or greedy. Given the choice, any one of them would have chosen poverty, with the success of their project, over wealth and its failure.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose