Wallace Stegner Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• [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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Summer, Football, Mistake

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Want, Aggravated, Persistent

  Wallace Stegner (1991). “All the Little Live Things”, p.96, Penguin

  23 Copy quote

• 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 humble 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Humble, Responsibility, Men

  Wallace Stegner, James Hepworth (1998). “Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner”

  15 Copy quote

• If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.

  Wallace Stegner

  Who We Are, Knows, Ifs

  9 Copy quote

• There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences

  Wallace Stegner

  Beautiful, Scene, Consequence

  Wallace Stegner (1991). “All the Little Live Things”, p.11, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• No place is a place until it has found its poet.

  Wallace Stegner

  Poet, Found

  8 Copy quote

• We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.

  Wallace Stegner

  Writing, Want, Knows

  7 Copy quote

• American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

  Wallace Stegner

  Essentials, Individualism, Belonging

  Wallace Earle Stegner (1987). “The American West as Living Space”, p.23, University of Michigan Press

  40 Copy quote

• No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.

  Wallace Stegner

  Belief, Genocide, Nazi

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier”, p.78, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

  Wallace Stegner

  Mistake, Thinking, Easy

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.362, Penguin

  14 Copy quote

• Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.

  Wallace Stegner

  Crafts, Taught, Talent

  Wallace Stegner (2002). “On Teaching and Writing Fiction”, p.46, Penguin

  30 Copy quote

• She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

  Wallace Stegner

  Mind, Looks, Rooms

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.108, Penguin

  64 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Yarn, Fiction, Legends

  Wallace Earle Stegner (1995). “Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs: living and writing in the West”, Random House Value Pub

  15 Copy quote

• Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

  Wallace Stegner

  Trying, Might, Forget

  Wallace Stegner, James Hepworth (1998). “Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner”

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Home, Divorce, Done

  44 Copy quote

• Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.

  Wallace Stegner

  Age, Youth

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.239, Modern Library

  29 Copy quote

• Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

  Wallace Stegner

  Nature, Rocks, People

  Wallace Earle Stegner (2007). “The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner”, Counterpoint

  22 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Ideas, America, National Parks

  Wallace Earle Stegner (1995). “Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs: living and writing in the West”, Random House Value Pub

  36 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Agreement, Civilization, Names

  17 Copy quote

• Hard writing makes easy reading.

  Wallace Stegner

  Reading, Writing, Easy

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.158, Modern Library

  54 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Long, Teeth, Locks

  Wallace Stegner (2002). “On Teaching and Writing Fiction”, p.37, Penguin

  27 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Dream, Memories, Eye

  Wallace Stegner (2013). “Crossing to Safety”, p.16, Penguin UK

  5 Copy quote

• There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

  Wallace Stegner

  Home, Headquarters, Best Times

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.6, Modern Library

  15 Copy quote

• Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

  Wallace Stegner

  Moving, Mountain, Desert

  Wallace Stegner (1971). “Angle of Repose”, Penguin Group USA

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Cutting, Years, Relaxation

  8 Copy quote

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