Wallace Stegner citations

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”

“We write to make sense of it all.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”