Wallace Stegner - You Quotes

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You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Wallace Stegner
Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

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

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
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
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
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
Nobody in my family had ever gone to college. I did, and there they said, You've got to major in something. So I said, Fine, economics. And I took one course in economics and that cured that.

Wallace Stegner
It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

Wallace Stegner
You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

Wallace Stegner
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

Wallace Stegner
I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.

Wallace Stegner
You married me... but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

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