S.L. Wallace Quotes

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

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.

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

Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

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

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

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

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.

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.

Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

The mind is smaller than the eye.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.

If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?

It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people. . . ."

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.

The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

Thought tends to collect in pools.

The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.