Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates.

mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. He

him, “the most naturally self-conscious man in the world.” His only mode of conversation was the monologue, and his version of the monologue was declamation.

when she stopped short just at the lower line of the apple trees, and stood for a moment with her face lifted, I chalked one up in her favor. I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wistaria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don’t, I prefer those who do.

charged with 6000 volts on her breast. If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferably “comic,” of foreplay, lubrication, penetration, and climax, and in deference to the accepted opinions about Victorian love, I would have to abort the climax and end the wedding night in tears and desolate comfortings. But I don’t know. I have a good deal of confidence in both Susan Burling and the man she married. I imagine they worked it out without the need of any scientific lubricity and with even less need to make their privacies public.

Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.

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.

He never did less than the best he knew how. If that was not enough, if he felt criticism in the air, he put on his hat and walked out.

He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.

when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue.

So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from the casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy?

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything–though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning.

sitting in Grandmother’s old wicker chair