“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, 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 recognize ourselves in fiction?”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“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 an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else — pathway to the stars, maybe. I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without benefit of drugs or orgies, have more fun.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something--forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from 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, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“This early piece of the morning is mine.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“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, quote from Crossing to Safety
“There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. When you stand outside a door and push the button, something has to happen. Someone must respond; whatever is inside must be revealed. Questions will be answered, uncertainties or mysteries dispelled. A situation will be started on its way through unknown complications to an unpredictable conclusion. The answer to your summons may be to a rush of tearful welcome, a suspicious eye at the crack of the door, a shot through the hardwood, anything. Any pushing of any doorbell button is as rich in dramatic possibility as that scene in Chekhov when, just as the Zemstvo doctor's only child dies if diphtheria and the doctor's wife drops to her knees beside the bed and the doctor, smelling of carbolic, takes an uncertain step backward, the bell sounds sharply in the hall. ”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from 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, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
“If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from 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, quote from Crossing to Safety
“Children from a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Crossing to Safety
Wallace Stegner
Born place: in Lake Mills, Iowa, The United States
Born date February 18, 1909
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“Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”
― Timothy J. Keller, quote from The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith
“I feel like im in this river just getting swept along... And if I hold on to anyone, if I'm holding on for dear life, I'm not getting anywhere. I'm stuck.
...I never wanted to get stuck”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Scott Pilgrim, Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour
“Go on, you've claimed your thirty pieces of silver, go do something crazy like put gas in that penis replacement you call transportation.”
― Molly Harper, quote from The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf
“All heaven is interested in the happiness of man. Our heavenly Father does not close the avenues of joy to any of His creatures. The divine requirements call upon us to shun those indulgences that would bring suffering and disappointment, that would close to us the door of happiness and heaven. The world's Redeemer accepts men as they are, with all their wants, imperfections, and weaknesses; and He will not only cleanse from sin and grant redemption through His blood, but will satisfy the heart-longing of all who consent to wear His yoke, to bear His burden. It is His purpose to impart peace and rest to all who come to Him for the bread of life. He requires us to perform only those duties that will lead our steps to heights of bliss to which the disobedient can never attain. The true, joyous life of the soul is to have Christ formed within, the hope of glory.”
― Ellen G. White, quote from Steps to Christ
“Don't blame anyone for what has happened to your father. Things have changed drastically since the days of his own youth,but he has refused to see the changes...The fact is that parents get only reflected glory from their children nowadays,whereas your father has invested in all of you, just as his father invested in him so that he could help on the farm. Your father forgot that he himself left the family farm to come to this place.”
― Buchi Emecheta, quote from The Joys of Motherhood
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A Break of DayBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
