Wallace Stegner Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Nature, Effort, Environmental

  130 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, World, Landscape

  86 Copy quote

• The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.

  Wallace Stegner

  Song, Rocks, Brooks

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, People, Needs

  139 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Home, Optimistic, Quality

  "Wallace Stegner, the Rural West, and Me" by John McChesney, web.stanford.edu. July 05, 2011.

  107 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Nature, Mean

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.333, Modern Library

  121 Copy quote

• [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

  Blood, Law, Together

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.96, Modern Library

  96 Copy quote

• 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

  Ideas, National Parks, Democratic

  127 Copy quote

• 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

  Heart, Rivers, Glasses

  Wallace Stegner (2015). “The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West”, p.35, Vintage

  59 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Moving, Sunset, Space

  88 Copy quote

• 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

  Good Life, Ambition, Support

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.16, Modern Library

  30 Copy quote

• Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

  Wallace Stegner

  Zoos, Dirty, Book

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

  119 Copy quote

• Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

  Wallace Stegner

  Inspirational, Motivation, Heart

  86 Copy quote

• 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

  Long, Realizing, Born

  54 Copy quote

• If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.

  Wallace Stegner

  Might, Old You, Wells

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Garden, Color, Green

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

  91 Copy quote

• Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

  Wallace Stegner

  Giving, Green, Littles

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  Law, Mind, West

  Wallace Earle Stegner (1987). “The American West as Living Space”, p.22, University of Michigan Press

  49 Copy quote

• [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

  12 Copy quote

• Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

  Wallace Stegner

  Wisdom, Knowing, Understanding

  57 Copy quote

• Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed 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 We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

  Wallace Stegner

  Country, Character, Mean

  30 Copy quote

• ... 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?

  Wallace Stegner

  Life, Wall, Exercise

  Wallace Stegner (1990). “The Spectator Bird”, p.101, Penguin

  20 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

  39 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stegner

  Notebook, Morning, Lying

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.191, Modern Library

  48 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

  8 Copy quote

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