Discover a wealth of wisdom and insight from Wallace Stegner through their most impactful and thought-provoking quotes and sayings. Expand your perspective with their inspiring words and share these beautiful Wallace Stegner quote pictures with your friends and followers on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blog - all free of charge. We've compiled the top 268 Wallace Stegner quotes for you to explore and share with others.

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial. By Wallace Stegner Flux Leah Heraclitus Prophets Composed

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. By Wallace Stegner Repose Angle Grandmother Years Year

To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills. By Wallace Stegner Committed Skyline Hills Save Hostile

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline they aren't remade. By Wallace Stegner Accretions Repudiations Civilizations Agreements Accomodations

What is such a resource worth? Anything it costs. If we never hike it or step into its shade, if we only drive by occasionally and see the textures of green mountainside change under wind and sun, or the fog move soft feathers down the gulches, or the last sunset on the continent redden the sky beyond the ridge, we have our money's worth. We have been too efficient at destruction; we have left our souls too little space to breathe in. Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future. By Wallace Stegner Worth Resource Green Costs Shade

The clear lesson of New England's history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so. By Wallace Stegner England World Women Clear Lesson

What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from. By Wallace Stegner Head Turn Direction Wheelchair Back

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. By Wallace Stegner Touch Shoulders Hands Loyalty Monogamy

I didn't know myself well, and still don't. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive. By Wallace Stegner Trusted People Loved Abrasive Feeling

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. By Wallace Stegner Friendship Shape Family Blood Liking

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it, but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives it has happened so thoroughly only once. By Wallace Stegner Madison Routes Braided Friendship Circuitous

It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below. By Wallace Stegner Somethingit Everythingto Found Fellow Bird

Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time. By Wallace Stegner People Told Computers Printout Memories

Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards - the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees - have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with. By Wallace Stegner Busy Overbusy Life Matters Head

It is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. By Wallace Stegner Nonfeelers Easy Mistake Nontalkers

It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions. By Wallace Stegner Relationships Life Love Sanctity Celebration

Actually I am pretty pregnant with the news Sid brought me, but glad we have not spread it. The girls look very happy. With their heads bound up in babushkas they might be out of the peasant chorus of a Russian opera. Any minute now we will sing and dance to the balalaika. Charity is tall and striking; Sally smaller, darker, quieter. One dazzles, the other warms. In a couple of hours I will need sympathy, but for now I like being washed by the wind. By Wallace Stegner Sid Pretty Pregnant Brought Glad

The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can't look upon them as just life, impartial and eternal and in flux, an unceasing interchange of protein. And I can't find proofs of the crawl toward perfection that she believed in. Maybe what we call evil is only as she told me that first day we met, what conflicts with our interests; but maybe there are such realities as ignorance, selfishness, jealousy, malice, criminal carelessness, and maybe these things are evil no mater whose interests they serve or conflict with. By Wallace Stegner Work Fission Life Forces Blind

But however you might rebel, there was no shedding them. They were your responsibility and there was no one to relieve you of them. They called you Sis. All your life people called you Sis, because that was what you were, or what you became - big sister, helpful sister, the one upon whom everyone depended, the one they all came to for everything from help with homework to a sliver under the fingernail. By Wallace Stegner Sis Rebel Shedding Called Sister

And so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility. But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve? By Wallace Stegner Possibility Give Uncommon Readers Chance

The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that is wasn't created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, have lived in it, known it, died in ithave both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef. By Wallace Stegner Place Anthropocentric Settled Wild Eyes

I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like anarchy, I don't even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don't like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it. By Wallace Stegner Wild Hour Life Live Colony

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, within 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. By Wallace Stegner Plan Undone Intentions Lie Morning

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer. By Wallace Stegner September Hat Feeling Left Days

And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it? By Wallace Stegner Asked Hopes Blame Bother Make

She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls, also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive. By Wallace Stegner Attend Ideas Fed Housed Amused

Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands, and like where I came from. I was used to dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colorstan, rusty red, toned whiteand the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush, and the sight of bare ground. By Wallace Stegner Homesickness Teacher Great Endless Mountains

It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary. I can't see anything wrong with any of that.''Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be inhabited by and surrounded by members of the human race. By Wallace Stegner Idealistic Gentleness Nature Voluntary Love

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived. In By Wallace Stegner Soberly Eyes Lived Studied Recognition

When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold. By Wallace Stegner Lights Bigger Ancient Frightening Cold

What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain. By Wallace Stegner Pain Strength Left Flowed Soaked

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts. By Wallace Stegner Deep Willed Habits Work Park

It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood. By Wallace Stegner Measure Longing Discontent Fatigue Bitterness

Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging. By Wallace Stegner Book Sets Voyage Discovery Discover

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it. By Wallace Stegner History Novelties Proper Midden Digging

The light over the whole hill was pure, pale, of an exaggerated clarity, as if all the good days of his youth had been distilled down into this one day, and the whole coltish ascendant time when he was 18, 19, 20, had been handed back to him briefly, intact and precious. That was the time when there had been more hours in the day, and every hour precious enough so that it could be fooled away. By the time a man got into the high 30s, the hours became more frantic and less precious, more needed and more carefully hoarded and more fully used, but less loved and less enjoyed. -Beyond the Glass Mountain (short story) By Wallace Stegner Time Precious Pale Day Pure

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? ... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me? By Wallace Stegner Friendship Basis People Interesting Reactive

The Cypress Hills massacre, ... one of the final outrages of the literally lawless West ... came ... along that practical and symbolic divide, between the Canadian system of monopoly trading and the American system of competition, whiskey, bullets, exploitation, and extermination. By Wallace Stegner Cypress Hills Massacre West System

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, preferable "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. By Wallace Stegner Modern Night Wedding Detail Climax

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across. By Wallace Stegner Integrity Material Greater Message

There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. By Wallace Stegner Effect Doppler Sound Pitch Physical

Marian's eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. Now you see? You wondered what was in whale's milk. Don't you know now? The same thing that's in a mushroom spore so small you need a microscope to see it, or in gophers, or poison oak, or anything else we try to pave under or grub out, or poison. There isn't good life and bad life, there's only life. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born! By Wallace Stegner Marian Blaze Eyes Absolutely Life

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing. By Wallace Stegner Big Rock Candy Mountain Action

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark. By Wallace Stegner Fiction Ideas Mind Writer Subject

Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man. By Wallace Stegner Contentment Peace Good Fortune Happiness

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 of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue. By Wallace Stegner Coincidental Time People Flimsy Protestations

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth. By Wallace Stegner Lady Learned Shit Grandmother Progress

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me. By Wallace Stegner Foam Smooth Rocks Shatter Gave

A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me. By Wallace Stegner Stream Trees Greek Muddy Village

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [ ... ]My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. By Wallace Stegner Wheelchair Live Cut Past Ended

We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way. By Wallace Stegner Mistakes Advantage Made Plenty Tripped

For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he has over the pontoons laid by others he may never have heard of. By Wallace Stegner Bridge History End Pontoon Pontoons

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters. By Wallace Stegner Headquarters Place Time Lives Friendship

Where you find the greatest good, there you will also find greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does. What makes the best environment for Clematis armandi makes a lovely home for leaf hoppers. A place where Joe Allston hopes to enjoy his retirement turns out to be Tom Weld's ancestral acres and a place attractive to Caliban. By Wallace Stegner Evil Good Paradise Find Greatest

I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others? By Wallace Stegner Cather Willa Paint Examine Life

In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places. By Wallace Stegner Country Child Adult History General

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains. By Wallace Stegner Faith Mountains Reclaim Deserts Move

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities. ... She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. By Wallace Stegner Points Looked Lines Line Point

If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea, By Wallace Stegner Lord Bryce America Idea Suggested

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. By Wallace Stegner Age Silence Automatic Modern Isolation

If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever. By Wallace Stegner Balance Forever Avoid Killer Diseases

In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then chewing it all over until it was soft. By Wallace Stegner Culture Rough Room Hung Trophies

A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard's book is Sid's wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here. By Wallace Stegner Catskills Buckaroo Relying Western Share

It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also. By Wallace Stegner Quits Easy Call Occasionally Moments

I'm not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I've written enough history books to know this isn't one. I'm writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?'Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually - I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. 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. By Wallace Stegner Western History Writing Ward Marriage

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true. By Wallace Stegner Story Baffled Write Ignorant Important

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing. By Wallace Stegner Parnassus Street Grub Turns Good

I imagine you will always be pinched for money, for time, for a place to work. But I think you will do it. And believe me, it is not a new problem. You are in good company ... Your touch is the uncommon touch; you will speak only to the thoughtful reader. And more times than once you will ask yourself whether such readers really exist at all and why you should go on projecting your words into silence like an old crazy actor playing the part of himself to an empty theater. By Wallace Stegner Money Work Imagine Pinched Place

Some of our superiors were indeed men of brains and learning and disinterested goodwill, but some were stuffed shirts, and some incompetents, and some timid souls escaping the fray, and some climbers, and some as bitter and jealous as some of us were at being inadequately appreciated. But still there they were, up in the sunshine above the smoke, a patch-elbowed tweedy elite that we might improve when we joined it, but that we never questioned. Especially during the Depression, when every frog of us was lustful for a lily pad. By Wallace Stegner Goodwill Shirts Incompetents Fray Climbers

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone. By Wallace Stegner Penance False Possibility Death Lifelong

When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails. Now By Wallace Stegner Wall Wilt Nails Nailing Custard

We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again. By Wallace Stegner Reconciled Left

And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the lazy, the insensitive, or the imitative. It is for the creative, and creativity implies both talent and hard work. By Wallace Stegner Writing Dilettantes Feelers Amateurs Parttime

There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? What are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognizable in fiction? By Wallace Stegner Raise Considerations Makes Make Book

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. By Wallace Stegner Home Comprehend Notion Nations Homeless

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 an 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 the overachievers, without benefit of drugs or orgies, have more fun. By Wallace Stegner Path Ambition Destination Essentially Pilgrim

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game. By Wallace Stegner Beautiful Young Hard Wife Deprivation

Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they mustn't. (I mustn't.) By Wallace Stegner People Ruth Tend Disengage Back

It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to understand it then, and I have not repudiated it till now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death - the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant. By Wallace Stegner Eden Doctrine Sin Costs Love

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria 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. By Wallace Stegner Place Coming Head Stopped Chair

Anyone pretending to be a guide through wild and fabulous territory should know the territory. I wish I knew it better than I do. I am not Jed Smith. But Jed smith is not available these days as a guide, and I am. I accept the duty, at least as much for what I may learn as for what I may be able to tell others. By Wallace Stegner Territory Jed Smith Pretending Wild

We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out. By Wallace Stegner Write Find

Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for somethingforms, colors, words, sounds. 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. By Wallace Stegner Pleasant Hear Things Hearing Embarrasses

We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocket. By Wallace Stegner Kind Magic Difference Reverential Traditional

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones. By Wallace Stegner Art Developing Sundial Theory Count

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you. By Wallace Stegner Struck James Henry Make Notes

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. By Wallace Stegner Drama Expectation Inevitability Demands Reversal

A poet is somebody who has written a poem. By Wallace Stegner Poem Poet Written

She was so old, she would have had to be dated by carbon 14. By Wallace Stegner Carbon Dated

In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up. By Wallace Stegner Midsummer Long Latitude Days Nights

There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill. By Wallace Stegner Mill Step Tread Treadmill

No Eden valid without serpent. By Wallace Stegner Eden Serpent Valid

The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air. By Wallace Stegner Indian Summer Halloween Lingered Warm

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people. By Wallace Stegner Selfish Poem People Speaks

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from. By Wallace Stegner

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun. By Wallace Stegner Orgies Fun Overachievers Suspect Makes

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery. By Wallace Stegner West Pessimistic Hope Native Home

Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good. By Wallace Stegner Good Find Greatest Evil Loves

In my experience, the world's happiest man is a young professor building bookcases. By Wallace Stegner Experience Bookcases World Happiest Man

When we're young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old. By Wallace Stegner Young Casually Sacrifice Offered

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our undramatic life. By Wallace Stegner Mailbox Life Scenes Dramatic Moments

I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption.His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both. By Wallace Stegner Ruth Pleasure Blame Finding Reaching

After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging? By Wallace Stegner Belonging Conviction

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time. By Wallace Stegner Idea Action Time Feeling Rests

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends. By Wallace Stegner Accidental Ends Life Live Amateurish

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me. By Wallace Stegner Balked Teach

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept. By Wallace Stegner Wisdom Accept Knowing

I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended By Wallace Stegner Ended Hope Found Pleasure

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. By Wallace Stegner Exist Walking Conventions Kind Pretty

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. By Wallace Stegner Human Fiction Lives Seldom Conform

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. By Wallace Stegner Hope Fact Possibility Reality Ahead

Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions. By Wallace Stegner Motorcycles Horses Ruth Cars Bicycles

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out. By Wallace Stegner Political Animal Defined Body Circulating

Girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard, By Wallace Stegner Norgaard Elsa Girl Eighteen Named

We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us. By Wallace Stegner World Leave Left Mark Marks

The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.those I don't have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on. By Wallace Stegner Quiet Delusive Substitutes Plenty Time

What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location. By Wallace Stegner Order Location Disorderly Crave Dislocated

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer. By Wallace Stegner Reader Writer Forget

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first. By Wallace Stegner Byproduct Poetry Living Product

I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that wellknown better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actuallyand then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure. By Wallace Stegner Eyes Actuallyand Deliberately Forgotten Find

Where do I belong in this country? Where is home? By Wallace Stegner Country Belong Home

Buenos dias, she said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye. By Wallace Stegner Hernandez Buenos Dias Greeting Response

This early piece of the morning is mine. By Wallace Stegner Mine Early Piece Morning

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship. By Wallace Stegner Writers Young Write Encouraged Discouraged

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to. By Wallace Stegner Writing Life Provide Material Attended

You must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books. By Wallace Stegner Books Brought Green Bag

Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential. By Wallace Stegner Natural Desires Satisfying Fine Consequential

I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue. By Wallace Stegner Consequences Ensue Discounting Doctrine Damn

A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter. By Wallace Stegner Matter Teacher Enlarges People Sorts

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime's worth of lessons. By Wallace Stegner Heart Lessons Proud Scar Holds

You can't retire to weakness you've got to learn to control strength. By Wallace Stegner Strength Retire Weakness Learn Control

There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours. By Wallace Stegner Nose Beards Gesture Thumbing

Maybe we were the Diggers of literature. By Wallace Stegner Diggers Literature

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards. By Wallace Stegner Landscape Child Exposed Early Sort

You married me ... but you didn't marry what you could make out of me. By Wallace Stegner Married Marry Make

Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers. By Wallace Stegner Smile Flung Flowers Impression Turned

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. By Wallace Stegner Destroyed People Remaining Wilderness Simply

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide. By Wallace Stegner Lucky Luckier Coincide

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. By Wallace Stegner Taught Question Questioning Good Thing

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging. By Wallace Stegner American Individualism Cherished Corrective Belonging

What should one do? If Ruth had any better luck with him I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms ... She followed him to the bottom of his burrow, trying to understand, she forgave him incessantly, she was the pacifying force when he and I clashed. And he went out of his way to treat her with even greater impatience and contempt than he treated me. His wretched treatment of his mother was one of the commonest sources of our quarrels. Sometimes I wondered if he didn't abuse her because she tended to take his side - he wanted no mediator between us. By Wallace Stegner Ruth Terms Luck Thought Simply

[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it. By Wallace Stegner Phrase Angle Repose Rest Alert

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. By Wallace Stegner Americans Profoundly Felt Deeply Loved

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past. By Wallace Stegner Salt Spices Jars Past Added

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records. By Wallace Stegner Death Convention Pain Book Records

Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? 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. By Wallace Stegner Hallie Immortals Compulsory People Afire

Every time. You know why? I want to fail. I work like a dog for twenty years so I'll have the supreme pleasure of failing. Never knew anybody like that, did you? I'm very cunning. I plan it in advance. I fool myself right up to the last minute, and then the time comes and I know how cunningly I've been planning it all the time. I've been a failure all my life. By Wallace Stegner Time Fail Failing Work Dog

I am terribly glad to be alive and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American with all the rights and privileges that those words connote. And most of all I am humbled before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility and being born luckier than most of the world's millions, I am also born more obligated. By Wallace Stegner American Terribly Connote Glad Alive

It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry. By Wallace Stegner End Resolves Tragedy Pathos Endowed

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone. By Wallace Stegner West Conditioned Western Geography Thing

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is somethingit can be everythingto have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle. (from The Spectator Bird) By Wallace Stegner Dark Flutters Venerable Bede Bird

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most. By Wallace Stegner Resentment Axe Public Held Grief

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst. By Wallace Stegner National Absolutely American Parks Idea

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction? By Wallace Stegner Book Read Lives Quiet Makes

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization. By Wallace Stegner Rocky Mountains West Vital Full

It should not be denied ... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West. By Wallace Stegner Denied Footloose Exhilarated West Obligations

The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killinganimals as a rule, men if necessary. By Wallace Stegner Wastefully Independently American Freely Rule

Oh, listen. Listen!' A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are (the geese), a wavering V headed directly over the hilltop, quite low, beating southward down the central flyway and talking as they pass. We stay quiet suspending our human conversation until their garulity fades and their wavering lines are invisible in the sky.They have passed over us like an eraser over a blackboard, wiping away whatever was there before they came. By Wallace Stegner Listen Wavering Excited Shouting Closer

Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window. By Wallace Stegner Long Slow Line Standing Window

The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration. By Wallace Stegner Great Divide Born Treeless Heads

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. By Wallace Stegner Break Including Hearts Things Towisdom

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. By Wallace Stegner Kinetic Doorbell Precipitate Potential

One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones. By Wallace Stegner Learned Hide Hard Pain Thing

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness. By Wallace Stegner Youth Age Chronological Happiness Times

There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private. By Wallace Stegner Guts Despise Fingers Thing Victorian

[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband. By Wallace Stegner Husband Dangerous Bride Apologetic

You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how to write a novel. But what you know is the novel you just wrote. You don't have the slightest notion how to write the one you're going to do next. By Wallace Stegner Confident Write Day Fear Trembling

Water is the true wealth in a dry land. By Wallace Stegner Water Land True Wealth Dry

It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space clarity & hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment. By Wallace Stegner Westerners West Sparseness Bigness Space

That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm. By Wallace Stegner National Parks Harm

Sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life. By Wallace Stegner Grandmother Sitting Life Wicker Chair

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any. By Wallace Stegner Live Beginning Wisdom Recognize Choose

I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery. By Wallace Stegner Healthy Scenery Shaped West Lived

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy. By Wallace Stegner Species Planet Exterminate Dangerous Life

F you could forget mortality ... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. By Wallace Stegner Mortality Forget Circular Proving Perspective

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom. By Wallace Stegner Interstate Bottom Day Half Traveler

You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur. By Wallace Stegner Human Attention Occur Achieve Stature

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? By Wallace Stegner Prophets Crazies Entertainers Preachers Judges

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest. By Wallace Stegner Live Potential Leave World Happened

It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing. By Wallace Stegner Queer Comforting Healing Broken Desolating

A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone. By Wallace Stegner Music Bone Wandering Dog Night

Knowledge extends in promontories and bays; or to put it vertically rather than horizontally, the strata from remote to recent never lie so unbroken that we cannot find some line of unconformity where the imagination must make a leap. There are so many horizons, geological and human, where the evidence is missing or incomplete. By Wallace Stegner Knowledge Bays Horizontally Leap Extends

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time. By Wallace Stegner Green Lawns Scale Time Color

We simply need that wild country available to us ... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. By Wallace Stegner Simply Wild Country Creatures Hope

Perceptions trained in another climate and another landscape have had to be modified. That means we have had to learn to quit depending on perceptual habit. Our first and hardest adaptation was to learn all over again how to see. Our second was to learn to like the new forms and colors and light and scale when we had learned to see them. Our third was to develop new techniques, a new palette, to communicate them. And our fourth, unfortunately out of of our control, was to train an audience that would respond to what we wrote or painted. By Wallace Stegner Learn Perceptions Modified Trained Climate

He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus. By Wallace Stegner Wore Barracks Earlaps Warming Muskrat

The creative writer is compulsively concrete ... His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions ... By Wallace Stegner Concrete Ideas Creative Writer Compulsively

I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic eventa death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a dinner party. By Wallace Stegner Changed Heard Death Divorce Ticket

Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us. By Wallace Stegner Fossil Made Nature Energy Worst

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures. By Wallace Stegner Profession Life Things Fiction Writer

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived! By Wallace Stegner Shelly Home Moderns Carrying Called

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly By Wallace Stegner Rings Slowly Approve Roots Deep

It happens that I despise that locution, "having sex," which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than fucking. By Wallace Stegner Good Deal Locution Sex Fucking

I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him. By Wallace Stegner Death Girl Delicacy Feeling Bring

When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain. By Wallace Stegner Wordsmith Words Twenty Love People

Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air. By Wallace Stegner Organizations Air Growing Strength Environmental

He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best. By Wallace Stegner Turn

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. By Wallace Stegner Rodman Terms Hydroponic Spoke Grandparents

Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to ... You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound. By Wallace Stegner Force Strong Resilient Patient Abiding

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. By Wallace Stegner Towns People Character Interchangeable

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. By Wallace Stegner Contacts Connections Friendships Continuities Relationships

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think. By Wallace Stegner Oliver Night Wrote Hasty Sketch

The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions. By Wallace Stegner Carpenters Sculptors Writers Admired Admire

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis. By Wallace Stegner Happened Nemesis History Resist Consequences

Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies. By Wallace Stegner Expose Dies Environment Child Susceptible

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process. By Wallace Stegner Westerner Adaptation Person Continuing West

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization. By Wallace Stegner Poems People Family Institutions Organization

I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden. By Wallace Stegner Lord Burden Tired Hearing Shapes

So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy? By Wallace Stegner Adultery Promiscuity Healthy Happened Base

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. By Wallace Stegner Blind Order Man Chaos Dumb

Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake. By Wallace Stegner Floating Memory Curving Risings Surface

I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don't think too much of it was holier-than-thou. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn't agree with a single value that I held. By Wallace Stegner Curt Sound Honestly Counsel Gave

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life. By Wallace Stegner Southwest Reads Tradition World Life

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part. By Wallace Stegner Part Abiding Concern Thinking People

I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten. By Wallace Stegner Genius Construction Beaten Proud

He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe. By Wallace Stegner Dixie Cup Back Surprised Found

If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get. By Wallace Stegner

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man By Wallace Stegner Feels Man Asked Replies Young

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ... By Wallace Stegner Recollection Found Invention Half

You can't be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own. By Wallace Stegner Close Mortality Friends Brought

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation. By Wallace Stegner Mormon Explanation Mormons Impossible Write

You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? 'Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published? By Wallace Stegner Christ Jesus Hear Dean Teacher

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts. By Wallace Stegner Ballads Yarns Legends History Monuments

It almost was. With By Wallace Stegner

Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to. By Wallace Stegner Largeness Matter Goal Lifelong Conscious

How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it. By Wallace Stegner Wilderness Wildernesslovers Mine Dig Cut

His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. By Wallace Stegner Time Clock Set Pioneer Arrived

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences. By Wallace Stegner Consequences Sense

Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth,.. By Wallace Stegner Sally Earth Smile Accept View

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples. By Wallace Stegner World Sanity Retain Hold Natural

As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. By Wallace Stegner Greens Moonlight Sunlight Desert Sage

Habit is my true, my wedded wife. By Wallace Stegner Habit True Wife Wedded

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. By Wallace Stegner Alike Clock Life Past Swiftly

Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. By Wallace Stegner Place Searching Born Find Realize

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept. By Wallace Stegner Wisdom Accept Knowing

Be bold, he says. Be brave. Be true to your birthright, what you recognize in your heart. I By Wallace Stegner Bold Brave Birthright Heart True

We are fossils in the making. By Wallace Stegner Making Fossils

within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. - By Wallace Stegner Grave Chet Carried Dead Unquietly

In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth. By Wallace Stegner Truth Fiction Agenda

Children from a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect. By Wallace Stegner Children Neglect Big Family Benefit

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it. By Wallace Stegner Practice Creation Skill Knack Empowered

If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are. By Wallace Stegner

His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. By Wallace Stegner Full Ecology Fumes Mouth Mind

For complete information about By Wallace Stegner Complete Information

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. By Wallace Stegner Rooms Mind

No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide. By Wallace Stegner Western Nazis Genocide Studied History

We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed, By Wallace Stegner Left Formed Wilderness Preservedas Kindsbecause

We're all tougher than we think we are. We're fixed so that almost anything heals. By Wallace Stegner Tougher Heals Fixed

No place is a place until it has found its poet. By Wallace Stegner Poet Place Found

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks. By Wallace Stegner Move Easier Die Side Trunks

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free. By Wallace Stegner Free Quaintly

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary. By Wallace Stegner Survival Called Accidental Temporary Engineered

Their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they. By Wallace Stegner Humor Underdog Putdown Powerful

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow By Wallace Stegner Sorrow Richer Life

intellectual hare By Wallace Stegner Intellectual Hare

When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations. By Wallace Stegner Mormon Marry Nations Family Tribes

Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind. By Wallace Stegner Read

Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? By Wallace Stegner Interesting Respond People Find

Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened. By Wallace Stegner Talent Taught Awakened

Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked. By Wallace Stegner Faked Habit Safe

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks. By Wallace Stegner Rocks Brook Lose Song Removed

This place is like the back entrance to a black cow. By Wallace Stegner Cow Place Back Entrance Black

Hard writing makes easy reading. By Wallace Stegner Hard Reading Writing Makes Easy

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, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you're large because you can't stand to be small. By Wallace Stegner Grow Largeness Matter Lifelong Content

A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out. By Wallace Stegner Writer Organism Writing Heart Cut

Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page. By Wallace Stegner Mexico Page Interlude Magic Chapter

We write to make sense of it all. By Wallace Stegner Write Make Sense

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private. By Wallace Stegner Act Private Meeting Writer Reader