What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet. . I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit. Wallace Stegner
About This Quote

The universe is not only vast, it is also infinite. And so it is of little surprise that some people are more powerful than others. But there is more to the universe than power and when a person reaches a point where they no longer have anything left to give, when their usefulness has been exhausted, their time has come, when they have simply become too much of a burden or a nuisance to continue on, they will lie down and let the universe take its course. In the passage above, Tolstoy talks about his grandmother’s life in marriage and how her life became a burden to her husband even though she was still able to live in the grandeur that had been her life up until that point.

She was a strong woman who had helped raise two children and she knew that her time was near, but because she would die before him she was no longer able to help him with his family. To be honest, at one point she didn’t even know who he was anymore. He had died before she had even met him.

Source: Angle Of Repose

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More Quotes By Wallace Stegner
  1. Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
  2. The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people...
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