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How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.
Wallace Stegner -
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.
Wallace Stegner
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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
Wallace Stegner -
... 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?
Wallace Stegner -
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
Wallace Stegner -
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
Wallace Stegner -
We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner -
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.
Wallace Stegner
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To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.
Wallace Stegner -
You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.
Wallace Stegner -
Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.
Wallace Stegner -
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.
Wallace Stegner -
History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
Wallace Stegner -
We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
Wallace Stegner
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Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.
Wallace Stegner -
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.
Wallace Stegner -
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed 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 We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
Wallace Stegner -
The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
Wallace Stegner -
It is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
Wallace Stegner -
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner -
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow.
Wallace Stegner -
A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
Wallace Stegner -
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.
Wallace Stegner