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. Talent, I tell him, believing what I say, is at least half luck. It isn't as if our baby lips were touched with a live coal, and thereafter we lisp in numbers or talk in tongues. We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not. Born to the English language and American opportunity {I say this in 1937, after seven years of depression, but I say it seriously} we are among the incredibly lucky ones.
( Wallace Stegner )
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