{"author":"Wallace Stegner","author_id":"Wallace+Stegner","total_quotes":66,"quotes":[{"text":"Wisdom. . .Is knowing what you have to accept.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["acceptance","wisdom"],"id":2799,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can’t look upon them as just life, impartial and eternal and in flux, an unceasing interchange of protein. And I can’t find proofs of the crawl toward perfection that she believed in. Maybe what we call evil is only as she told me that first day we met, what conflicts with our interests; but maybe there are such realities as ignorance, selfishness, jealousy, malice, criminal carelessness, and maybe these things are evil no mater whose interests they serve or conflict with.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["beauty","good-vs-evil","humanity","life","nature"],"id":5330,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["memoir","writing"],"id":11247,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"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.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["disruption","emptiness","evil","habit","habits","old-age","work"],"id":14872,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... An accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... Hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["betrayal","infidelity","longing","touch"],"id":30969,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["hope"],"id":41959,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["eyes","intimacy","transparency"],"id":64040,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["delusion","greed","illusion"],"id":66076,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"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.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["circumstances","civilization","heartbeat","poetry","rocky-mountains","rough","roughness","west"],"id":74668,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"},{"text":"Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe.","author":"Wallace Stegner","tags":["ambition","drive","motivational"],"id":76325,"author_id":"Wallace+Stegner"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":66,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}