Mary

“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

“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

“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

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