Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

I just finished reading Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner after it was recommended by a friend, Jay Schoenberger, who fancies himself a hippy-redneck-warrior-poet. It's a timely read and an interesting contrast to Revolutionary Road, which I also just finished.

Some choice passages from Crossing to Safety:

"For a minute I stand listening to her breathing, wondering if I dare go out and leave her. But she is deeply asleep, and should stay that way for a while. No one is going to be coming around at this hour. This early piece of the morning is mine."

"There is was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters."

"We all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life."

"In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game."

"I don't know about you, but Sid and I think a little city like this, with a good university in it, is the real flowering of the American dream. Don't you feel it? It might have felt like this in Florence in the early fifteenth century, just before the big explosion of art and science and discovery. We want to settle in, and make ourselves as useful as we can, and help it grow, and grow ourselves. We're determined to give it our absolute best. Before we're all done with it, let's make Madison a place of pilgrimage!"

"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."

"Don't extend any invitations you don't want accepted, Sally says. It's dangerous to wave raw meat around tigers."

"There sit our two podded wives close together on the couch, whispering and intimate, two months away, rosy with the heat of indoors. Coming from the kitchen bringing the rum bottle and the teakettle for a fresh round of drinks, I see them there, and think how in those two women four hearts are beating, and it awes me."

"Battell Pond is out of a Hudson River School painting, uniting the philosophical-contemplative with the pastoral-picturesque."

"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."

"But what the memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship - parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours."

"Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most."

"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?"

"Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness."