Wallace Stegner Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

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
It seems to me that every story has its own form, which can't be imposed upon the material but must be discovered within it.

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

Wallace Stegner
The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

Wallace Stegner
To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

Wallace Stegner
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
I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.

Wallace Stegner
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
No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.

Wallace Stegner
He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.'

Wallace Stegner
It is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

Wallace Stegner
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
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Wallace Stegner
There is nothing in the history of the West that indicates any great concern for the environment or for the renewability and sustainability of the economy. Nor for the labor force used in that exploitation. Those are all serious mistakes.

Wallace Stegner
No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

Wallace Stegner
I don't think the word originality, as it's usually defined, is particularly useful. It usually seizes upon some innovation that often turns out to be frivolous or essentially unimportant.

Wallace Stegner
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
These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. 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
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
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
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

Wallace Stegner
There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.

Wallace Stegner
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
I grew up doubting the big-bonanza-just-over-the-next-rise notion because for years I watched my family chase it. I got pretty jaundiced on that subject. A little realism would have helped my family a good deal.

Wallace Stegner
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
Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations 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.

Wallace Stegner
If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.

Wallace Stegner
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