Top 100 Quotes About Wallace Stegner
#1. I'm a huge fan of San Francisco. And I was out here for a couple years in the mid-'90s when I was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#2. There are only two living American authors fully deserving of the Nobel Prize. One is Lewis Mumford. The other is Wallace Stegner, whose novels and essays provide us a comprehensive portrait of industrial society in all its glittering corruption and radiant evil.
Edward Abbey
#3. Wallace Stegner once wrote that the lessons of life amount to scar tissue.
Michael McGarrity
#4. As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.
Stephen Gaghan
#5. American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
Wallace Stegner
#6. 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
#7. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...
Wallace Stegner
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.
Wallace Stegner
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first.
Wallace Stegner
#14. You married me ... but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
#15. 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
#16. Their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they.
Wallace Stegner
#17. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#18. To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
Wallace Stegner
#19. She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.
Wallace Stegner
#20. Be bold, he says. Be brave. Be true to your birthright, what you recognize in your heart. I
Wallace Stegner
#21. Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
#22. 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 killing
animals as a rule, men if necessary.
Wallace Stegner
#23. Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner
#24. 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
#25. Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability.
Wallace Stegner
#26. 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
#27. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#28. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#32. Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.
Wallace Stegner
#33. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#36. That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
Wallace Stegner
#37. 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
#38. A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Wallace Stegner
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#43. No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
#44. Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
Wallace Stegner
#45. One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
Wallace Stegner
#46. There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.
Wallace Stegner
#47. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#48. We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again.
Wallace Stegner
#49. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#50. He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.
Wallace Stegner
#51. You must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.
Wallace Stegner
#52. I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
Wallace Stegner
#53. 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
#56. Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner
#57. Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
Wallace Stegner
#58. Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.
Wallace Stegner
#59. 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
#61. 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
#62. As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.
Wallace Stegner
#63. Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
Wallace Stegner
#64. You can't retire to weakness
you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner
#65. 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
#66. There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.
Wallace Stegner
#67. I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.
Wallace Stegner
#68. 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
#69. 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.)
Wallace Stegner
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. [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
#74. 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
#75. I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended
Wallace Stegner
#76. 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
#77. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#78. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#79. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#83. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#86. 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
#87. We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.
Wallace Stegner
#88. 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,
Wallace Stegner
#89. 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
#90. Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime's worth of lessons.
Wallace Stegner
#91. In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
Wallace Stegner
#92. 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
#93. In my experience, the world's happiest man is a young professor building bookcases.
Wallace Stegner
#95. You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? 'Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published?
Wallace Stegner
#96. The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
Wallace Stegner
#97. 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.
Wallace Stegner
#98. [I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
#99. If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
Wallace Stegner
#100. Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace Stegner
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