Wallace Stegner Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.

  Wallace Stegner

  World, Mark, Left

  8 Copy quote

• Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

  Wallace Stegner

  Reality, Facts, Possibility

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.338, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow

  Wallace Stegner

  Sorrow

  Wallace Stegner (1991). “All the Little Live Things”, p.214, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Thinking, Two, Lucky

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.457, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.

  Wallace Stegner

  West, Adaptation, Process

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

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Wallace Stegner

  Roots, Long, Grows

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

  7 Copy quote

• We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

  Wallace Stegner

  Nature, Effort, Might

  14 Copy quote

• To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

  Wallace Stegner

  Littles, Values

  Wallace Stegner (1991). “All the Little Live Things”, p.98, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.

  Wallace Stegner

  Teacher, Teaching, People

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.86, Modern Library

  13 Copy quote

• We write to make sense of it all.

  Wallace Stegner

  Writing, Make Sense

  11 Copy quote

• 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 colors--tan, rusty red, toned white--and 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Teacher, Fall, Sight

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Loyalty, Lying, Hands

  15 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Civilization, Healthy, West

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

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Men, Air, Discovery

  6 Copy quote

• We are fossils in the making.

  Wallace Stegner

  Fossils

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.4, Modern Library

  5 Copy quote

• I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.

  Wallace Stegner

  Teach

  8 Copy quote

• 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. I know what he means, and I agree.

  Wallace Stegner

  Lying, Mean, Fiction

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.163, Modern Library

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Drinking, Fighting, Bird

  Wallace Stegner (1990). “The Spectator Bird”, p.131, Penguin

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• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Teaching, Book, Discovery

  Wallace Stegner (2002). “On Teaching and Writing Fiction”, p.28, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

  Wallace Stegner

  Intimate, Reader, Meetings

  Wallace Stegner (2002). “On Teaching and Writing Fiction”, p.60, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• Water is the true wealth in a dry land.

  Wallace Stegner

  Land, Water, Dry

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• The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

  Wallace Stegner

  Life, Errors, Dubious

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Art, Character, Thinking

  Wallace Earle Stegner (1987). “The American West as Living Space”, p.4, University of Michigan Press

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  People, Twenties, Way

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Country, Sea, Half

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