Mary > Mary's Quotes

“Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees—have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Hard writing makes easy reading.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“The clear lesson of New England’s history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocket.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“A poet is somebody who has written a poem.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event--a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a dinner party.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? What are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognizable in fiction?”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“No place is a place until it has found its poet.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety