Wallace Stegner Quotes

“What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.”

“Traditional angling is a mindset. So,have you set your mind?”

“Angling is a sport, so sporting ethics should apply.”

“If you are looking at anything from one point, from one angle, you can never attain wisdom because wisdom is to see all the things from every point, from every angle!”

“Nothing can be located in space and time w/out changing angles. Perceive Him as God, or Spirit, or Son, these are mere snapshots from three different angles of one and the same being. Unless the Christians learn how to put them together, they would learn nothing concerning the essence of the Eternal.”

“Never be afraid to try. The only angle through which you can approach success is by the “try-angle”. You may fail if you try, but shame unto you if you don’t try at all. If you fail…rise up and try again and again!”

“[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.”

“What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.”

“There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. 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.”

“Cock your hat - angles are attitudes.”