## Metadata * Author: [[Wallace Stegner]] * ASIN: B000XUDI60 * ISBN: 037575931X * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000XUDI60 ## Highlights Remembering Laughter, — location: [39](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=39) ^ref-573 --- find personal redemption in being “a sticker,” the dignity found in choosing to stay rather than following the impulse to leave. — location: [109](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=109) ^ref-48339 --- No outsider ever knows the interior landscape of a marriage. — location: [114](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=114) ^ref-38762 --- The American West as Living Space. — location: [177](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=177) ^ref-7303 --- “Friends come first, family comes last. She treats him the way she’d treat herself.” — location: [3113](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=3113) ^ref-50583 --- What they had, and they had so much, was ours before we could envy it or ask for it. — location: [3378](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=3378) ^ref-52612 --- she is not going to be shushed, not even by cancer. She will burn bright until she goes out; — location: [4715](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=4715) ^ref-22267 --- Pojoaque, — location: [4730](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=4730) ^ref-63635 --- In a way, cancer is a blessing, it generally does give you a little time.” — location: [4793](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=4793) ^ref-2522 --- heads. I saw Sid look away from Charity’s unsteadily insistent glance to follow the Monarch’s movement. Perhaps he was fantasizing, as I was, that there went part of what had once been the mortal substance of Aunt Emily or George Barnwell or Uncle Dwight, absorbed by the root of a beech tree in the village cemetery, incorporated into a beechnut, eaten by a squirrel, dropped as a pellet in a meadow, converted into a milkweed stalk, nibbled and taken in by this butterfly, destined to be carried south on a long, unlikely, interrupted migration, to be picked off by a flycatcher, brought back north in the spring as other flesh, laid in an egg, eaten by a robbing jay and laid as another kind of egg, blown out of a tree in a windstorm, soaked up by the earth, extruded as grass, eaten by a freshening heifer, some of it foreordained to be drunk, as Charity said, by its own descendants with their breakfasts, some of it deposited in cowpads, to melt into the earth yet again, and thrust upward again, immortal, in another milkweed stalk preparing itself to feed more Monarch butterflies. — location: [4839](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=4839) ^ref-11443 --- When she opened her eyes again it was as if marble had awakened. — location: [4861](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=4861) ^ref-21201 --- He was a man in a briar patch. So long as he kept still he was comfortable, but every time he moved he found thorns. — location: [4953](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=4953) ^ref-25351 --- A good part of who Stegner was, I think, resides in that passion, for the concern was the inevitable by-product of years of searching. Stegner spent much of his life trying to find his place—not so much his intellectual or social place (though that, too, was important to him), but his actual physical and spiritual place in the world, a way to see the world and himself in it. When I first was given a tour of the little plot of land around his and Mary’s home in Los Altos Hills, California, I was struck by the tender sense of intimacy his idle conversation about the place conveyed. Every tree and bush—most of which he had planted forty years before—seemed as real a part of his being as his own internal organs. He had always envied those with their feet and their traditions firmly planted in one place. So he found his hilltop in Los Altos Hills in 1948 and built a house upon it and surrounded it with growing things, the root of each tree and shrub a spike nailing him down. On the other side of the continent, in Greensboro, — location: [5700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=5700) ^ref-40379 --- If you can’t be born to a place where you can stay, then make one—or two. — location: [5709](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000XUDI60&location=5709) ^ref-34320 ---