Wallace Stegner Quotes
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Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
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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.
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By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
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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.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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What is such a resource worth? Anything it costs. If we never hike it or step into its shade, if we only drive by occasionally and see the textures of green mountainside change under wind and sun, or the fog move soft feathers down the gulches, or the last sunset on the continent redden the sky beyond the ridge, we have our money's worth. We have been too efficient at destruction; we have left our souls too little space to breathe in. Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.
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You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.
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No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
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If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
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If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.
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After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.
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We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.
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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.
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Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.
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Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has.
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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.
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Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
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Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.