Wallace Stegner Quotes
We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.
Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
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.
He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
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.
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.
I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
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.
Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.
I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
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 life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.
Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.
In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.
In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.
There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.
The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.