Wallace Stegner Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.

  Wallace Stegner

  Agreement, Civilization, Names

  16 Copy quote

• Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?

  Wallace Stegner

  Thinking, Vanity, Light

  9 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

  4 Copy quote

• We are fossils in the making.

  Wallace Stegner

  Fossils

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

  4 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Air, Land

  7 Copy quote

• I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.

  Wallace Stegner

  Who I Am, May, Knows

  9 Copy quote

• One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.

  Wallace Stegner

  Mean, World, Chance

  Wallace Stegner (2015). “The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West”, p.119, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch.

  Wallace Stegner

  Two, Hopeful, Brain

  "Angle of Repose".

  10 Copy quote

• [I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.

  Wallace Stegner

  Husband, Wife, Apologetic

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.72, Penguin

  8 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, People, Challenges

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

  4 Copy quote

• Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.

  Wallace Stegner

  Writing, Ambition, School

  "On Teaching and Writing Fiction".

  4 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Thinking, People

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Practice, Skills

  7 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

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Attention, Pay, Emotion

  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

• Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

  Wallace Stegner

  Character, People, Towns

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.77, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.

  Wallace Stegner

  Inspirational, Weakness, Retiring

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.454, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me.

  Wallace Stegner

  Running, Smell, Tree

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier”, p.29, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

  Wallace Stegner

  Beautiful, Games, Wife

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mistake, Judging, Way

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.12, Modern Library

  6 Copy quote

• Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

  Wallace Stegner

  Rugged Individualism, Chance, Scenery

  Wallace Stegner (2015). “The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West”, p.31, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

• You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

  Wallace Stegner

  Married, Make Out

  5 Copy quote

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