Wallace Stegner Short Quotes

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

Wallace Stegner
Ghost towns and dust bowls, like motels, are western inventions.

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

Wallace Stegner
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

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

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

Wallace Stegner
The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.

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

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

Wallace Stegner
There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.

Wallace Stegner
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Wallace Stegner
Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

Wallace Stegner
It has never been man's gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has.

Wallace Stegner
It doesn't seem to me that life conforms to systems. Only systems conform to systems.

Wallace Stegner
A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wallace Stegner
We are creatures shaped by our experiences, we like what we know more often than we know what we like.

Wallace Stegner
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus.

Wallace Stegner
A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

Wallace Stegner
Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.

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
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
Those I don't have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.

Wallace Stegner