Wallace Stegner Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

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

Wallace Stegner
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.

Wallace Stegner
It doesn't seem to me that life conforms to systems. Only systems conform to systems.

Wallace Stegner
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
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
Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

Wallace Stegner
A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard's book is Sid's wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here.

Wallace Stegner
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
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
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
Every time. You know why? I want to fail. I work like a dog for twenty years so I'll have the supreme pleasure of failing. Never knew anybody like that, did you? I'm very cunning. I plan it in advance. I fool myself right up to the last minute, and then the time comes and I know how cunningly I've been planning it all the time. I've been a failure all my life.

Wallace Stegner
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
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
It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

Wallace Stegner
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
The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.

Wallace Stegner
A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

Wallace Stegner
It has never been man's gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has.

Wallace Stegner
We are creatures shaped by our experiences, we like what we know more often than we know what we like.

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

Wallace Stegner
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
A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

Wallace Stegner
Ghost towns and dust bowls, like motels, are western inventions.

Wallace Stegner
It wasn't until Salt Lake City that I began to be a real addict. I would go down to the library two or three times a week to bring away three or four books each time, without any direction.

Wallace Stegner
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
Before you can convince the reader, you have to convince yourself that, in effect, you have invaded and become the person you're speaking through.

Wallace Stegner
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.

Wallace Stegner
Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.

Wallace Stegner
Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?

Wallace Stegner
I am not a good soldier in the environmental armies because I don't seem to work well in bodies with other people. Here's an irony: I'm against individualism gone rampant, but I don't actually seem to be a very good team player.

Wallace Stegner