Top 100 Wallace Stegner Quotes
#1. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...
Wallace Stegner
#2. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#3. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#4. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#5. You married me ... but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
#6. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#7. Their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they.
Wallace Stegner
#8. Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
#9. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#10. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#11. The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
Wallace Stegner
#12. History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
Wallace Stegner
#14. That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
Wallace Stegner
#15. 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
#16. A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Wallace Stegner
#18. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#19. No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
#20. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#22. Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner
#23. Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.
Wallace Stegner
#24. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#25. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#26. Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
Wallace Stegner
#27. 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
#28. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#29. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#30. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#32. [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.
Wallace Stegner
#33. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#34. I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended
Wallace Stegner
#35. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#36. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#37. 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
#39. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#40. 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?
Wallace Stegner
#41. Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime's worth of lessons.
Wallace Stegner
#42. Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you.
Wallace Stegner
#43. In my experience, the world's happiest man is a young professor building bookcases.
Wallace Stegner
#44. [I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
#45. If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
Wallace Stegner
#46. within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. -
Wallace Stegner
#47. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#50. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#51. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#52. When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.
Wallace Stegner
#54. Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
#55. His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.
Wallace Stegner
#56. Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our undramatic life.
Wallace Stegner
#57. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#58. Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.
Wallace Stegner
#59. 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
#60. We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.
Wallace Stegner
#62. After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?
Wallace Stegner
#63. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#64. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#65. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#66. She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
Wallace Stegner
#67. [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.
Wallace Stegner
#68. 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
Wallace Stegner
#69. There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill.
Wallace Stegner
#70. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#71. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#72. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#73. The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
Wallace Stegner
#74. I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
Wallace Stegner
#75. I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
Wallace Stegner
#76. 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
#78. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#79. 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
#80. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#81. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#82. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#83. 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
#85. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#87. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#88. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#89. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#90. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
#91. National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
Wallace Stegner
#92. 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?
Wallace Stegner
#93. 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
Wallace Stegner
#94. Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.
Wallace Stegner
#95. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#96. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#97. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#98. The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
#100. Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
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