-
I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.
Wallace Stegner -
The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
Wallace Stegner
-
I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier than most of the world's millions, I am also born more obligated.
Wallace Stegner -
I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
Wallace Stegner -
In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
Wallace Stegner -
If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
Wallace Stegner -
There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
Wallace Stegner -
It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.
Wallace Stegner
-
You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner -
Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
Wallace Stegner -
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.
Wallace Stegner -
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
Wallace Stegner -
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner -
Every time. You know why? I want to fail. I work like a dog for twenty years so I'll have the supreme pleasure of failing. Never knew anybody like that, did you? I'm very cunning. I plan it in advance. I fool myself right up to the last minute, and then the time comes and I know how cunningly I've been planning it all the time. I've been a failure all my life.
Wallace Stegner
-
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
Wallace Stegner -
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
Wallace Stegner -
Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
Wallace Stegner -
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner -
Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
Wallace Stegner -
I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
Wallace Stegner
-
This early piece of the morning is mine.
Wallace Stegner -
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.
Wallace Stegner -
...wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner -
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
Wallace Stegner