By Wallace Stegner
Crossing to Safety on Amazon
Review
Crossing to safety is a book about greatness, chaos, and the fibers that bind people together. It follows the relationship between two couples, Larry and Sally Morgan and Sid and Charity Lang, and the quiet but deep relationship that they develop over decades of friendship. It is a book about what makes life worth living, especially within the bonds of marriage and friendship, and what makes life hard.
Crossing to Safety impressed me with its juxtaposition of the desire for order and the chaos that consumes life. The two couples started off hopeful for a life filled with meaning, but economic and health setbacks make their goals difficult to attain. Despite this, the lack of order didn’t damage the relationships, if anything, they simply exaggerated the characteristics that were present before. Love, compassion, and industry grew alongside contempt, friction, and control.
My Favorite Quotes
xviii
Largeness is a lifelong matter, you grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn’t, its teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you’re large because you can’t stand to be small.
pp. 191
Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.
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, wikthin 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.
pp. 98
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 a 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 overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.
pp. 207
“Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?” I said. “We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.”
pp. 239
“… Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.”