“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.”
Work
Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery--personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.
Quotes
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Wallace Earle Stegner
Canonical work source
“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.”
“It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.”
“Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.”
“Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.”
“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...”
“We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elemen...”