Wallace Stegner Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

  28 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

  62 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

  42 Copy quote

• Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

  Wallace Stegner

  Home, Appreciate, Notion

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.149, Penguin

  41 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

• Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

  Wallace Stegner

  Broken Heart, Encouragement, Inspirational Life

  Wallace Stegner (1990). “The Spectator Bird”, p.21, Penguin

  39 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

  28 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

• 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

  26 Copy quote

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

  Wallace Stegner

  Poet, Found

  7 Copy quote

• wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

  Wallace Stegner

  Evil Love, Evil, Paradise

  34 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

  14 Copy quote

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

  Wallace Stegner

  Writing, Want, Knows

  6 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”

  14 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

  4 Copy quote

• Hard writing makes easy reading.

  Wallace Stegner

  Reading, Writing, Easy

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

  53 Copy quote

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

  Wallace Stegner

  Who We Are, Knows, Ifs

  8 Copy quote

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

  Wallace Stegner

  World, Mark, Left

  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

  8 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

  6 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

• 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

  5 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

  4 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

  17 Copy quote

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