Wallace Stegner Quotes

Wallace Earle Stegner was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977. Wikipedia

✵ 18. February 1909 – 13. April 1993  •  Other names والاس استقنر

Works

Crossing to Safety

Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose

Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner

The Spectator Bird

The Spectator Bird

Wallace Stegner

Crossing to Safety

Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose

Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner

The Spectator Bird

The Spectator Bird

Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner: 29 quotes1 like

Famous Wallace Stegner Quotes

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

Wallace Stegner book Angle of Repose

Source: Angle of Repose

“Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?”

Wallace Stegner book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

“She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.”

Wallace Stegner book Angle of Repose

Source: Angle of Repose

“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”

Wallace Stegner book The Spectator Bird

Variant: Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Source: The Spectator Bird

“It should not be denied… that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.”

Wallace Stegner

“It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is chooserules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.”

Wallace Stegner

Source: All the Little Live Things

Wallace Stegner Quotes about life

“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.”

Wallace Stegner book Angle of Repose

Source: Angle of Repose

“I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow”

Wallace Stegner

Source: All the Little Live Things

“It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.”

Wallace Stegner book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner Quotes

“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, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … 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. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960) <br class="br">Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

“Wisdom… is knowing what you have to accept.”

Wallace Stegner book Angle of Repose

Source: Angle of Repose

“it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.”

Wallace Stegner

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

Wallace Stegner

Source: All the Little Live Things (1967)

“Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.”

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 book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

“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 book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

“We write to make sense of it all.”

Wallace Stegner

“Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.”

Wallace Stegner book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

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

Wallace Stegner book Angle of Repose

Source: Angle of Repose

“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 book Angle of Repose

Source: Angle of Repose

“Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.”

Wallace Stegner book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

“You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.”

Wallace Stegner book Angle of Repose

Source: Angle of Repose

“wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.”

Wallace Stegner

Source: All the Little Live Things

“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 book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

“If the national park idea is the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.”

Wallace Stegner

It All Began with Conservation Smithsonian magazine, April 1990, pages 35-43

“It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now.”

Wallace Stegner

This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers is a collection of essays and photographs edited by Wallace Stegner and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1955. This passage is from the collection's first essay, "The Marks of Human Passage", which is by Stegner (page 17).

“It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.”

Wallace Stegner

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)

“It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has.”

Wallace Stegner

"The War Between the Rough Riders and the Bird Watchers" (1959 address; reprinted in Wildlands and Our Civilization, David Brower, editor, 1964, and in Voices for the Wilderness, William Schwarz, editor, 1970, page 76)

“The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe.”

Wallace Stegner

"The Best Idea We Ever Had" Marking the Sparrow's Fall: The Making of the American West, page 137

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