Wallace Stegner - People Quotes

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

Wallace Stegner
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.

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

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
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