Wallace Stegner Quotes

83 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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