Wallace Stegner Quotes
... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?
Quotes to Explore
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Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.
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Whatever I know how to do, I've already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.
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I understand that a lot of girls feel encouraged by what I have been able to do, but I've never felt like I'm a role model. I'm not concerned with building a great legacy or anything because I'll be dead so it won't matter.
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For me, 30 days, it's already pretty good for ribeye or sirloin on the bone. I like my meat grass-fed and juicy. The French never age their meat more than two or three weeks.
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It's not good for comedy to be like, 'Thanks for liking me.' Being popular is poison.
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My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
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I went to these mixers, you know, where you're supposed to meet people. And sure enough, some guy asked me for my phone number. but at the end of the evening he gave it back.
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When you get out of Washington, you realize how much of a Beltway bubble exists.
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I really like crop tops. I like how you can dress them up or down, with jeans or a skirt and heels. I like to be showy and cute. I don't want to be in just a jacket and pants and boots.
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To go straight to 'Scandal' and get to play the larger-than-life guy who has the page-long rants and gets drilled in the leg with blood flying everywhere, it was a blast. It's really been a nice counterpoint after the first season of 'The Carrie Diaries.'
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I'm obsessed with historical English royalty.
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I want police to be protected.
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Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer, or of anyone else whose words may delight us for the moment, but the estimation of facts will fall short of what is really true.
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Spiraling demand for resources of which our world contains a finite supply is the great long-term threat posed by globalisation. That is why we need new technology to relieve it.
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My dad, as a guy, had to quit school in the ninth grade, fought in the Battle of the Bulge. And spent his life pushing wheel barrels of heavy wet cement. So we've gone from pushing cement to now in one generation pushing legislation. But we always want any president to succeed, to do well; that means America does well and Americans do well.
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Religion, richest favor of the skies.
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If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.
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It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
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We need above all to know about changes; no one wants or needs to be reminded 16 hours a day that his shoes are on.
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Would it not be as well to liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks themselves, as to make them instruments for enlisting white soldiers? It would certainly be more consonant to the principles of liberty which ought never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty...
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... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?
