Wallace Stegner

“I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended”

“Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?”

“I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption.His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both.”

“What should one do? If Ruth had any better luck with him I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms...She followed him to the bottom of his burrow, trying to understand, she forgave him incessantly, she was the pacifying force when he and I clashed. And he went out of his way to treat her with even greater impatience and contempt than he treated me. His wretched treatment of his mother was one of the commonest sources of our quarrels. Sometimes I wondered if he didn't abuse her because she tended to take his side - he wanted no mediator between us.”

“I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don't think too much of it was holier-than-thou. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn't agree with a single value that I held.”

“It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.”

“He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.”

“it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.”

“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.”

“No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.”

“It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.”

“Anyone pretending to be a guide through wild and fabulous territory should know the territory. I wish I knew it better than I do. I am not Jed Smith. But Jed smith is not available these days as a guide, and I am. I accept the duty, at least as much for what I may learn as for what I may be able to tell others.”

“...you must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.”

“There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”

“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.”

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

“If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. 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.”