Wallace Stegner - Place Quotes

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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

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 wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

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

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
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
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